


My Name Is No-one

by Derin



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Gen, Happy Ending, M/M, Mistaken Identity, Mutual Pining, except no they're Martin's, mechs au, the mechs are the Archivist's band, these boys are such idiots I love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:00:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 24,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25661758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: What if Jon isn't in The Mechanisms? What if Martin is?What if it is extremely important that his new boss in the archives, whom he's only crushing on a little bit and who seems to be developing a taste for steampunk cabaret, never ever finds this out?
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 467
Kudos: 427





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Mechs band members are given new names because I don't want to imply any relationship to the actual band members, rpf creeps me out. No connection between the band members and tma characters they've voiced is intended.

“Wey-hey, the wormhole beckons, distant stars await!”

“Thank you!” Jonny D’Ville shouted over the cheering crowd, giving a theatrical bow as the room shook with their jumping and clapping. He knew he was grinning like an idiot. The whole band was. They always did, on the stage.

Five minutes later he was backstage, lightheaded with fading adrenaline, shedding accessories. Nikola finished washing off the Toy Soldier’s moustache and gave him a concerned look.

“You alright, Martin?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Martin pulled off his wig and rubbed at his head. “You’d think I’d be used to the itch of this thing by now.”

“You’d think you would’ve bought a better wig by now.” Nikola rolled her eyes. “Or we can just invent some kind of radiation disaster or something to explain why Jonny has blond hair now aqnd ditch it entirely.”

Martin shook his head. “No, the wig’s fine.” Martin didn’t think he could go on stage without it. The costume was integral to the persona; bits and pieces had changed over the years, but Martin didn’t think he could pull off Jonny D’Ville if he left too much of his actual self exposed. He’d probably faint if he ever had to sing in front of an audience like that without enough of the costume to hide behind. “Anyway, you guys will have to go on to drinks without me tonight. I have to get home; I have work in the morning.”

“You have work every – oh!” A slow smile spread across Nikola’s face. “The promotion, right?”

“It’s a transfer, not a promotion,” he mumbled. “But yeah. Archives. I want to make a good impression, and I can _not_ risk showing up hungover, or, or tired, or – ”

“You haven’t gone to work hung over since that bet last year.”

“And tomorrow definitely isn’t a good day to break that streak. Drink extra for me, okay?”

Exactly twenty one hours later, Martin stumbled into his apartment, faceplanted onto his bed, and screamed directly into his pillow.

He wondered, vaguely, whether things would have gone better if he hadn’t gone to work at all. He could’ve stayed out drinking all night, got drunker than he ever had in his life, slept through the entire day and shown up at the archives tomorrow, and things would technically have gone better, because Jon hadn’t been expecting him and probably wouldn’t have even questioned that he was there on the second day. He wouldn’t even have had to explain where he’d been, which was good, because Martin was sure he’d literally die if any of his coworkers found out he spent his weekends growling prophecies about a scifi version of the Holy Grail instead of knitting sweaters or whatever they assumed he did with his time.

But he hadn’t stayed at home. Instead, he’d had to live through this day, and would forever be known as the idiot who let a dog into the archives.

His next step was obvious. He was going to have to quit. He’d email a resignation to Elias and just… never show up to work again. He would couch surf until his bandmates all got tired of him living in their flats and then die on the street somewhere after years of busking for coins on random street corners.

Or, to save time, he could simply lie on this bed and let his soul depart his body, never to return. Did his life insurance cover dying of shame?

Well. If he was going to die of shame he would, at the very least, have one last cup of tea first. He rolled listlessly off the edge of his bed, catching himself on his feat with the practiced ease of someone who had been rolling listlessly off things for years, and went to put the kettle on.

Some careful brewing and a few exploratory sips later, he determined that while the tea was fairly good, it wasn’t ‘last cup of tea ever’ good, meaning he’d have to put off dying of shame and actually go back to work tomorrow. Pity.

\----------------------------------

  
  


Tim leaned back in his chair and concentrated on staying very still. He kept his breathing very slow, very gentle, and the paper crane on his nose that filled up almost his entire vision barely wavered. Not long now.

Then the door to the archives opened, Tim jumped, and the crane fell to the floor.

Sasha laughed. “Not even thirty seconds! I win!”

“I move for a mistrial!” Tim protested. “Martin startled me!”

Martin loitered in the doorway. “Oh, I, uh… sorry, did I interrupt anything?”

“No,” Sasha said. “You just made Tim lose a bet, which is practically a public service.”

“Oh. Sorry, Tim.”

“Don’t apologise to him, he doesn’t deserve it.”

Tim screwed the paper crane into a ball and lobbed it at her head. The first two weeks in the archives had been… fine, he supposed. Jon had become a bit uptight with the new job, but surely he’d settle down and stop being such an arse eventually. He was probably just insecure because he knew that everyone else knew the job should’ve been Sasha’s. But that was Elias’ fault, not Jon’s, no matter how bullshit it was.

Working with Sasha was always great, of course, and Martin was pretty cool. A bit difficult to get alone with since he was basically impossible to tease; he took everything too seriously and blushed at the slightest comment, which was probably why Jon picked on him so much. But that first day rounding up the dog had been a blast, and they never would’ve caught the damn thing so fast without Martin.

“Right,” Martin said. “Well, I was going to make tea, if anyone – ?”

“Shh! Listen!” Tim put up a finger. “The boss is doing AmDram again.”

The measured tones of Jon recording a statement filtered through the thin office door.

“Which one is it?” Sasha whispered.

Tim, whose desk was closest to the office, leaned over to listen. “Oooh, it’s the creepy table one. With the guy who eats books.”

“He ate one notebook, Tim.”

“He’s going to hear you guys gossiping,” Martin whispered.

“So long as we’re quiet enough to not be on tape, he won’t hear a thing,” Tim pointed out. “He never does when he’s in…” he raised one curled hand dramatically… “the drama zone.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a little drama,” Martin said.

“Never said there was something wrong with it. It’s just hilarious. He’s all professional for most of the day, but bust out a statement and he’s gotta get all that passionate feeling into the recording.”

“I’m not sure why we’re doing audio recordings of them at all,” Sasha shrugged. “One could make the argument that it’s an accessibility thing, but having to put them on cassette tape kind of kills that one. I’m sure using a screen reader on a typed digital copy is more convenient than having to dig up a tape recorder to listen to them.”

“I think Jon said that Elias wants audio copies?” Martin shrugged.

“Oh. Well, if the guy who writes the paychecks wants them.”

Tim’s phone beeped. A message from Carol, his friend who worked in births, deaths and marriages.

  
  


**No marriage certificate for Alex Tarney.**

**Thanks Carol.**

**How does your boss think you’re getting this info**

**anyway? You’re not following normal procedure.**

**I told him I seduced you.**

… **You what?**

**I told him I seduced someone in your dept and**

**sweet talked them for information.**

**That is the DUMBEST excuse I have ever heard.**

**I think he believes me! You’re like the fifth person**

**I’ve said I’ve seduced for info. He thinks I’m James**

**Bond or some shit.**

**He thinks you’re a whore.**

**Pfft, if I was a whore, would I still be working here?**

**I would make so much money as a whore. The most**

**gorgeous bisexual in London.**

**I know four bisexuals hotter than you.**

**That’s a straight-up lie. I would know them.**

**You hang around the wrong people. Go to a**

**Mechs concert. Being bi is just being attracted**

**to all the Mechanisms and it’s basically**

**impossible not to be.**

**The who now?**

  
  


Carol texted him a link. Before he could respond, Jon burst out of his office, looking like the God of Drama had pulled his very soul from his body and committed it to tape, leaving him a hollow husk of a man.

That, or maybe he just needed a nap.

“Any updates on the Cassidy case?” he asked Tim.

“Uh, yeah. That guy, Alex Tarney? Never married. So that whole thing – ”

“Is rubbish, yes. I thought so. Thank you, Tim.” He spared a nod for Tim, a small smile for Sasha, and completely ignored Martin as he bustled out of the office to wherever the hell he was going.

“Well,” Tim said, “I think I’m all caught up on my follow-up tasks, so…”

“So you have time to help me with filing?” Sasha asked, standing up. “Great. Let’s go.”

The rest of the day went smoothly, and Tim was back at home by the time he checked his phone again and remembered the link to whatever the hell The Mechanisms were. After some random flitting about on youtube he determined that yes, Carol was right; all of the band members were extremely attractive, and their music was captivating. Especially the lead singer, who had a strange familiarity about him and a magnetic personality that entranced Tim from the first time he said “fuck”.

Four hours of random youtube clips later, and a chance close-up of Jonny D’Ville giving a familiar shy little grin for just a second, and Tim recognised the face under the wig and the makeup and the blustering persona and the stage lights.

“What the fuck, Martin?” he whispered.


	2. Chapter 2

Sasha came into work early, slightly miffed to find that this did not, in fact, make her the first person in for the day. Jon was well and truly settled in his office, doing something involving headphones and not wanting to be interrupted, which was normal. Tim was present and pacing, which was not.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” he said as she entered, as if she were late, which she wasn’t. “Sash, you have to see this.”

“Some creepy ghost thing?” she asked.

“Better. Way better. My friend put me onto this band and you have to see them.” He pulled up a video of a group of badly dressed people singing about Greek myths and pointed excitedly.

They were brash and had a lot of energy and seemed to like to banter, which explained why Tim liked them, but Sasha didn’t understand why he was showing her.

“Right,” she said. “I’m glad you’ve found a new band, I guess.”

“Sash. Look at the lead singer. At Jonny D’Ville.” He pointed to the man in an excess of belts, singing into his microphone like he was about to bite into it like a donut. “Look at his _face_ , Sash.”

“Um, yeah?”

“The body language is throwing you off. It threw me off, too.” He paused the video and zoomed in, and Sasha saw it.

“No way,” she whispered.

Just then, Martin came in. He paused under the heat of their suddenly intense looks.

“Um,” he said, “is everything alright?”

“Everything’s just fine, Captain,” Tim said with a mischievous grin. “Or should I say, first mate?”

Sasha had never seen the blood leave someone’s face so fast. Martin dropped the files he was holding, paper scattering across the floor. “How did you find out?” he gasped.

Tim looked confused. “You’re… you’re all over youtube. Are you alright?”

The blood was back in Martin’s face, colouring it a fiery red. “It’s fine, you just… nobody’s supposed to know.”

“That you’re the lead singer of an awesome band?” Tim asked, confused. “If it was me, I’d tell everyone.”

“Well, I’m not you,” Martin said stiffly. “I just… does Jon know?”

“I haven’t told him,” Tim said. “Sorry. If it’s a secret, we’ll keep it to ourselves.”

“Please.” Martin started to gather up the fallen papers.

“Don’t know why, though,” Tim said as he and Sasha bent to help him. “Jonny D’Ville doesn’t seem the type to – ”

“Yes, well, Jonny D’Ville isn’t real,” Martin snapped.

\-------------------------

  
  


It was another three whole weeks before Tim fucked up. His headphones had broken, so he was playing music on his laptop quietly enough that it shouldn’t disturb the others – or at least, they didn’t say anything about it. Aside from the slight colour that crept into Martin’s cheeks whenever he walked by while a Mechanisms song was playing, he seemed to be succeeding.

“Well,” Sasha announced, triumphantly closing a folder, “That’s my morning work done. I’m going to lunch. You boys care to join me?”

“Can’t yet,” Tim said. “The bossman wants these reports, and you know how he gets. I can be there in twenty.”

“I’ve got to look into this suicide in Sheffield,” Martin added regretfully, shaking his head.

So Tim was left alone in the archives, and turned his music up a little. It was still pretty quiet, he thought, and it didn’t even occur to him that Jon would probably take off his own headphones at some point until Jon peeked around the thin wooden door.

“What are you listening to?” Jon asked.

“Jon!” Tim made to shut off the music, figured that would probably just be way more suspicious, and hoisted a relaxed smile onto his face. “Pump Shanty. By the Mechanisms.” There was no way Jon would recognise Martin’s voice. No way. Tim knew, and he could barely comprehend them as the same voice.

“The theme is… interesting.”

“Yeah, they’re, um… their gimmick is that they’re a bunch of future space pirates given immortality by a vampire to serve as her backup band until… um.” the whole concept sounded rather more ridiculous when he was trying to explain it to the walking button-up shirt that was Jonathan Sims. “They sing scifi tragedies.”

“I… see.”

Pump Shanty had ended by this point, and Tim was listening on random shuffle, so next up was a voice several tones deeper than Martin’s normal one growling about hellfire and the Holy Grail. Tim felt kind of defensive about this, that he was somehow badly advertising the Mechanisms by letting Jon’s first exposure to them be these snippets in random order, then reminded himself that he wasn’t trying to advertise The Mechanisms to Jon, the whole point was to not let him hear it. Oh god, he was going to figure it out, and Martin was going to think Tim had told him.

But Jon just listened quietly for about half a minute before seemingly realising he was just standing there listening to music. “It… has merit,” he told Tim stiffly, then headed back into his office., without telling him to turn the music down.

Holy shit, that was close. But at least it was over now. No more listening to the Mechs in the office, Tim decided.

\-----------------------------

  
  


It was a Friday, and Martin was almost home before he realised he’d left his phone at the office.

He swore quietly. Any other day of the week he would’ve left it, but he wasn’t going phoneless all weekend. He had band practice, and if there was some kind of change of plans or emergency… Martin turned around and headed right back into the Underground.

Martin wasn’t surprised to find the doors unlocked and the lights on in the archives. Did Jon ever go home? It was a Friday night! He was going to kill himself, working like this! He was surprised to find that loud music was pouring from the head archivist’s office, and his heart dropped straight down through his stomach at the sound of it, because he recognised the opening to Red Signal immediately. Through the open office door, he could see Jon smiling faintly while he took notes on whatever he was reading through. He looked up and saw Martin, and the two of them stared at each other with identical deer-in-the-headlights looks for a few seconds.

“Martin!” Jon got up and scooted around his desk. “I thought everyone had gone home.”

“I forgot my phone,” Martin squeaked, trying not to swallow his own tongue in his panic. “What are you, uhm, listening to?” he added, because he was an idiot.

“The Mechanisms,” Jon said, struggling to sound dignified over the sounds of Jonny D’Ville screaming about the tearing down of the walls of a false and hollow reality. “They’re very, uh, they perform tragedies. In, um, science fiction settings.”

“That sounds fun,” Martin tried, trying to ignore his own voice ranting about Yog-Sothoth in the background.

“I know it sounds weird,” Jon said defensively. “But they are actually very good.”

 _He doesn’t recognise me_ , Martin realised. _He doesn’t know it’s my voice_. Relief washed over him. “Ah. Well, I’ll have to check them out sometime. I’m… glad you’ve found music that you like. I’ll just grab my phone and go, shall I?” He snatched it up off his desk. “You are… going home soon, right?”

“As soon as I’ve finished this, yes,” he said. “Have a good weekend, Martin.”

“You, too.” Martin rushed out of the archives, away from the appraising gaze of one Jon and the accusing voice of another.

It was fine. Everything was fine. Jon had heard the Mechanisms, and he still didn’t know that Martin, for all he was trying to be a professional research assistant, spent his weekends in leather vests and eye makeup yelling about apocalypse trains and fairy tale space wars. And he even seemed to _like_ the Mechanisms, which was a…

Oh, no. Oh, no.

Martin had pretended not to know who the Mechanisms were. He’d lied to him, and now he was going to have to hide his affiliation with the band forever, or make things ten times more awkward. If he ever found out now…

Was it too late to revive the ‘dying of shame’ plan?

\-------------------

  
  


Jon watched Martin leave, and then rested his face against the door frame and groaned. After a month and a half of trying to be collected, trying to be professional, trying not to let anyone doubt that he was remotely capable of this job when there was that persistent sense of someone watching him, doubting him, judging him… and Martin had walked in and heard him listening to filk music. (Were the Mechanisms filk? They didn’t describe themselves as such, but… not, not going down that train of thought; the last thing he needed was to lose himself to wikipedia for four hours when he was supposed to be finishing up work.)

It was alright for Tim to do this sort of thing in the office, but Jon was supposed to be professional. He’d seen Sasha’s little eyeroll at Tim’s musical tastes, and the look Martin had just given Jon… he was never going to live this down.

The whole office would know by Monday, he supposed. This wasn’t ideal.

Well, damn the whole thing. His musical tastes had no bearing on his competence as an archivist, and he wasn’t putting much in the opinion of someone who’d let a dog into the archives, at any rate. He’d listen to what he damn well liked and it wasn’t anybody’s business. It didn’t bother him that Martin so obviously despised his taste in music. Jon had nothing to prove.

It didn’t bother him at all.


	3. Chapter 3

“I owe DC comics an apology,” Tim whispered to Sasha one morning.

“Uh, why?”

“I never gelled with the whole Superman thing. I thought there was no way people wouldn’t recognise Clark Kent right away. But, well…” he gestured at Jon’s office, where Jon waspishly asking Martin if he’d finished a particular bit of follow-up could be heard through the thin wood. “He’s been listening to the Mechs for the past two weeks and he still doesn’t see it! I _know_ he’s seen videos. Two weeks, Sasha!”

“Well, don’t tell him!”

“I’m not going to tell him, I just don’t see – everything alright, Martin?” he asked as Martin exited the office.

“Hmm? Fine.”

“He was being a dick to you,” Sasha said. “We heard. I’ll go give him a piece of my mind.”

Martin waved this suggestion away. “It’s fine. He’s just having a tough week.”

“That’s no reason to – ”

“He’s just scared, Sasha. He’ll calm down.”

“Scared? There’s nothing to be scared of.”

“He’s been head archivist for 2 months and he’s still freaking out. It’s like… uh, have you ever done work on the stage? Performance work?”

“He’s an archivist, he’s not on any stage.”

“I think Jon thinks he’s walking on a stage whenever he sets foot in the archives.”

“That’s just called having a stick up his butt,” Tim said sourly.

“He’ll get over it eventually,” Martin said with a shrug. “I did. Turns out I just needed way more eye makeup.” And he kept walking, before they could ask any follow-up questions.

\------------------------

  
  


“Who’s your favourite Mech?” Tim asked in the office one day.

“We’re supposed to be working, Tim,” Jon pointed out. He really shouldn’t be gossiping about bands.

“I’m a fan of Marius,” Tim continued, ignoring this. “Love me a man with a violin. Although there’s also Nastya.”

“I don’t even go here,” Sasha said, “but one of them is called Ashes O’Reilly and burned down an entire planet, so I don’t know how anyone else can be in the running.”

“Aha! You ‘go here’ enough to know who Ashes O’Reilly is!” Tim said triumphantly. “You do like the band!”

“She knows because you never _stop talking about them_ ,” Martin said pointedly. Jon, as always, tried not to feel too defensive over Martin’s obvious hatred for the Mechanisms. Martin probably listened only to old jazz on records or something. If he’d give them a chance…

“I do have a favourite band member,” Jon announced. “They are all fine musicians, of course, but I happen to like Jonny D’Ville. Are you alright, Martin?”

“Just fine,” Martin gasped, choking on his tea. The klutz.

“Do you like him just because he has your name?” Sasha asked.

“No! I happen to think he’s very charismatic. He is a… skilled performer, able to play well to a crowd.”

“You think he’s hot and has a sexy voice,” Tim translated, absent-mindedly clapping Martin on the back as he struggled to breathe.

Jon coloured. “To reduce talent to mere _physical attractiveness_ – ”

“And the voice?”

“A good voice – ”

“A _sexy_ voice.”

“ – is an important instrument for a professional singer!”

“What do you think, Martin?” Tim asked Martin, who seemed to have mostly recovered. “Do you think Jonny D’Ville has a sexy voice?”

“He’s most definitely not my type,” Martin glowered. His glare should by all rights be peeling the very skin from Tim’s face, but Tim just grinned.

Wow, did he hate the band _that_ much? Jon only listened on headphones in the office, but he made a mental note to make sure that Tim did, too. No sense starting fights over something as trivial as music choices.

Still, he couldn’t resist saying, “I understand that our tastes are different, Martin, but I do wish you’d give them a chance.”

Martin reddened. Tim suddenly found some work he had to bury his head in right at that second. Sasha looked away, biting her lip to unsuccessfully hide a smile.

Jon looked at his assistants, puzzled. Were Sasha and Tim trying to start a fight? Over music? That wouldn’t do! And Jon was getting defensive over someone he’d never met, like a schoolgirl with a boy band crush! Not that Jon had a crush. He’d never met Jonny. Or any of the Mechanisms.

Martin opened his mouth to reply, but Jon firmly decided that he wasn’t going to argue about this, no matter how much Tim wanted to stir up petty drama. He held up a hand. “We can agree to disagree, I suppose. Sasha, did you find anything on the Sheffield case?”

“Oh! Yes. I tracked down the father…”

Jon got back to work.

\------------------------

  
  


Martin didn’t think he’d ever looked forward to being Jonny D’Ville this much. It had been a rough week, he was sick of tracking down random people from statements that were fake (they knew the real ones didn’t record digitally! Why was Jon pretending otherwise?), and he just wanted to sing about people dying.

Jon would have lost interest in the Mechanisms by now if Tim didn’t keep bringing them up every few days, he was sure of it. There was no way that Jon, Mr Officious, who probably listened only to classical music and read the oldest publications of Shakespeare plays he could find in his spare time, actually _liked_ the band.

If he waited, Tim would get bored with the joke, and then Jon would get bored with the band, and the whole thing would fade into the background… but for now, there was singing to be done. Martin finished putting on the face of Jonny D’Ville, settled into the persona, and strode confidently out onto the stage.

\-----------------------

  
  


They were even better live. Tim was surprised by the enthusiastic energy in the room, even though he’d seen it on many amateur videos of the band. It was impossible, in person, to reconcile the man on stage with his coworker.

“So you _did_ like the Mechanisms,” an amused voice said behind him, and he turned to see his friend, Carol.

“You told me this is where the four bisexuals hotter than me are,” he pointed out. “Thought I should at least try to find them.”

“It’s five now. I found another one.”

“Well that’s clearly a lie. Five people hotter than me in London is impossible.”

“One of them’s just here for a year. They’re from Italy.”

“A year doesn’t count!”

After the concert, Carol asked, “You want to go see if we can catch any of the band members before they leave?”

Tim shook his head. “Better not,” he said. He didn’t think Martin would be happy to see him here. It’d probably throw him off his game.

“Are you shy?” Carol laughed.

“Nah. Just busy.”

\--------------------------

  
  


On Monday morning, Martin made Jon a cup of tea, like always, carried it into his office, like always, and almost dropped it, which was not like always. Staring at him from a poster on the wall, amongst a couple of new inspirational posters he’d never seen before, was a sea of very familiar faces, including his own under the makeup of Jonny D’Ville.

It was also covered in signatures. He remembered signing that poster, last night. Oh, god! Jon hadn’t been...? No. No; Martin was certain he would’ve noticed if Jon had approached him after the show.

Jon noticed him staring. “Ah. Elias suggested brightening up the office with a few personal touches. To make statement givers feel more comfortable.”

“With band posters?”

“I don’t think band posters are necessarily appropriate for the office, but Elias picked up that one.”

“Oh.” Martin relaxed a little. Then tensed again. Did Elias know? Would he – ? No, he wasn’t going to fire someone for being in a band; that was a ridiculous thing to think. Martin had made sure that the Mechanisms wouldn’t come up when employers googled his name by simply not associating the name ‘Martin’ with their web page, back when he’d been looking for work, but trying to put up a professional front when you were a candidate for employment was different. There was absolutely no reason why it would be a problem for Elias to know.

Except that Elias already gave Martin the heebie-jeebies whenever he looked at him with his shrewd, penetrating gaze, and if he knew, Martin would probably die under that stare. And he might mention it in passing to Jon, and then Martin would definitely die, because he’d been pretending to have nothing to do with the Mechs to Jon for _months_. But what was Martin supposed to do? Go to Elias and be like, “Hey, I don’t know if you know I’m in this band, but if you do, could you not mention it to Jon? Why? Oh, because I’m a walking disaster who’s created an impossible social situation around this very stupid detail of my life.”

“Do you need anything, Martin?” Jon asked.

“No! No, I, um… I just made you some tea. Is all.” He put it carefully on the desk, trying to ignore the judging leer of Jonny D’Ville looming over him.

“Right. Thank you.”

“Right.” Martin left.

This should’ve ended by now. Even Tim had moved on to other music. Why hadn’t Jon?


	4. Chapter 4

There were many negative aspects to being trapped in your apartment by a woman full of supernatural worms, Martin thought. He had missed a lot of work. He had missed band practice, and they had a show coming up. Also, he was going to die.

Martin had given up any hope of rescue three days in. He figured that if people hadn’t noticed him missing then, they weren’t going to. Plenty of the statements involved people being in situations where time didn’t make sense; spending days in a box only to find it had been a single night, things like that. If his neighbours hadn’t noticed the worm invasion, if his coworkers and bandmates hadn’t tried to find out why the hell he wasn’t showing up… well, that probably meant they weren’t going to.

The power was out, which mean his fridge and freezer weren’t working. And his oven wasn’t working. After the first two days, when it had become clear that he might have to ration, he’d prioritised eating gross cold frozen dinners until his freezer didn’t seem safely cold any more and then moved on to tinned goods.

Without power, and without milk, he was going to die without a last cup of tea after all. Night after night, he curled up in bed in the dark, unable to sleep because he kept feeling that something might be crawling up his legs, starting to burrow in… if she broke in after he was dead, would his corpse make as ready a home for the worms?

After two stressful, sleep- and caffeine-deprived weeks and with his supply of tinned peaches almost exhausted, Martin looked at the door to his flat and thought, _this is probably good inspiration for an album, actually_. The origin would probably be way too morbid for the band to perform, after they found his corpse, but he had nothing else to do with his time.

So he started to write. Caught in the creative haze and too exhausted and fed up to be afraid of Jane any more, he wrote out his experiences as poetry for later conversion to song lyrics and got… a bunch of garbage. He was way too sleep-deprived for this. He couldn’t think for more than two straight sentences and that fucking knocking on the door was just distracting. Would she just break in and kill him already?

And then it stopped.

Had she just… gotten bored with waiting? Gone away? Martin knew he should probably still be afraid, but he was kind of burned out on fear. He tried the light.

It came on.

He checked the door – no worms. No living worms, anyway; there were some dead ones about, and he gathered them in a glass jar for if Jon demanded ‘proof’ and… went to work.

 _Is this a normal thing to do?_ He wondered to himself on the Underground. _I’ve been under seige for 2 weeks and I’m just going to work? Should I be worried that I’m thinking like this?_ But where else would he go? He sure as hell wasn’t staying in his flat, and he worked at a place whose whole purpose was looking into stuff like this. If he didn’t work at the Magnus Institute, he’d probably head straight there to make a statement anyway.

He checked himself about ten billion times for worms, but that was just an ingrained habit by now.

Jon seemed to be just finishing up a statement as Martin strode into his office, trying not to walk into any walls in his sleep-deprived dizziness, and dumped the worms on his desk. It took him a few minutes to convince Jon that he wanted to make a statement, wanted to get everything down, but once he got started he found it surprisingly easy to talk.

He hadn’t expected Jon to take things so seriously. He certainly hadn’t expected him to suggest he stay in the archives, where the climate control shielding should at least keep the worms out if he was followed.

He hadn’t even considered that he might be followed. He’d been planning to spend a few nights on one of his bandmate’s couches, but there was no way he could bring the worms to them. So he packed some bags, being sure to put Jonny D’Ville’s gear right down the very bottom (not that anyone would go through his bags, but still), and prepared to spend a week, maybe even two, out of home.

By the third week, he was starting to get a bit restless. A storage room in the archives wasn’t an ideal living space, and Jon worked ridiculous hours, meaning that whenever Martin went anywhere there was a thirty per cent chance he’d run into him. Martin was in the habit of singing to himself at home, and more than once he’d barely managed to stop singing one of his songs under his breath before Jon walked in. How would that conversation go? ‘Oh yeah, I actually don’t hate this band that you’ve decided I hate? Yeah, it is funny how well I can imitate the lead singer’s voice, isn’t it?’

He hadn’t explained about the supernatural worm attack to the band. No need to weird them out with his ridiculous workplace hazards. He’d just told them his place was being fumigated and he was staying with a friend. They had a show coming up, and he wasn’t going to distract anyone by explaining that at least some of the weird monsters from his dumb supernatural research job were real and possibly trying to kill him. It’s not like the band was in danger; while Martin was sleeping at the Institute, the worms seemed to be staying at the Institute. Maybe Jane Prentiss had lost interest in him, and was only interested in the Institute itself? Maybe it was safe to go home?

Best not to risk it.

Anyway, that’s why he ended up nearly bowling Jon over on the stairs to the archives with his bag of Jonny D’Ville Stuff as he rushed out to catch the bus and get to the show. “Sorry!” he yelled over his shoulder to a bewildered Jon, but he didn’t have time to stop.

The show itself burned off his anxiety, as it always did. Afterwards he went out for drinks, because fuck it, and accepted Jordan’s offer of his couch for the night rather than going back to the Institute full of fucking worms. He boarded the bus to the Institute in the morning, rugged up against the chill in his favourite overcoat and trying to tell himself that he definitely wasn’t hung over. Not that it would matter. It was a Sunday, he didn’t have to work.

He was heading down the stairs into the archives when a handful of worms fell on him from the doorframe. What were they even doing up there?! He yelped, tried to brush them off, but they were in his _sleeves_ and his _collar_ and they could _bite his neck any second_ and –

Martin threw his coat to the floor and started stamping on it, crushing worms. One og them clung to the leather vest he’d thrown his coat over, but even if they did try to burrow, they wouldn’t be able to get through the leather; he brushed it off.

“Martin?” Jon called from downstairs. “Are you alright?”

“It’s just worms!” He called back. “Why are you here at seven in the morning on a Sunday?”

He could hear Jon coming up the stairs, and felt a thrill of panic as he realised something – the vest he’d thrown on that morning to save carrying it in his bag was, of course, Jonny D’Ville’s, and Jon had definitely seen it on youtube. Would he recognise it? Surely not; not under everything else. But what if he did? And Martin, the Martin Jon knew, was hardly the kind to wear leather vests!

“Everything’s fine here!” Martin squeaked, struggling out of the vest. “Just worms, I’ve got them!” Hair a mess and t-shirt half untucked, he managed to toss the vest to the floor and kick the wormy overcoat over it just as Jon came up the stairs.

Jon took one look at his flustered appearance and raised his eyebrows. “Holy hell, at you alright?”

“Yeah, there… there weren’t that may! I just, um. Panicked.” He stomped on the coat a couple more times to make his point.

“Ah. Well.”

Time to change the subject. “Why are you in on a Sunday morning?”

“There was just some… some things I wanted to get finished before Monday.”

“Do you ever sleep? Or relax? Or do anything except file old documents and read really creepy stories into a tape recorder?”

“Some of us have work that – ”

“When was the last time you slept more than six hours?”

“In a twenty four hour period, you mean?”

“Uninterrupted.”

“I’m _fine_ , Martin. I’m not the one who was just attacked by worms, _again_.”

“A few just fell on me. It wasn’t another siege, or anything.”

“Well. Anyway.” He glanced down at the coat, and frowned a little, and Martin wondered for a second if the vest was visible and he’d somehow recognised the whole thing from seeing a corner of it on the floor and if he knew from that about Jonny D’Ville and he was about to ask why –

But all Jon said was, “Good thinking on the boots.”

“Huh?” Martin glanced at his own feet and realised he wasn’t wearing his normal office footwear, but Jonny D’Ville’s black leather boots. Because they were bulkier and therefore more convenient to wear instead of carry in the bag, which should have been fine because Jon shouldn’t have been in because it was _seven in the morning on a Sunday, the madman_.

“The boots. If we have parasite worms underfoot. I don’t think they can bite through leather.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking!” Martin lied enthusiastically. “That’s why I got them!”

“Hmm. Perhaps I should get some.”

Martin briefly thought of Jon dressed in leather (for protection!) and nearly passed out into the dead worms.

Jon was frowning at him again. “Martin?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you wearing eyeliner?”

“No!” Martin lied quickly, shielding his eyes with one hand in a way that wasn’t remotely weird or suspicious. Most of Jonny D’Ville’s makeup came off easily, but the liner right up at the lashes was always a bother. He should’ve taken the time to clean it properly before going out last night. He definitely should’ve taken the time before coming back to the archives.

It eventually occurred to Martin that his response was making things weirder, so he dropped the hand, looked Jon directly in the eyes and said, “Jon, go home and sleep.”

Was Jon blushing? “Right,” he said gruffly. “Yes, I should do that. I’ll just, ah. Go and get my things.”

Martin bundled up his coat and vest, and went to take his own advice and sleep off his Definitely Not A Hangover.

\----------------------

  
  


Jon didn’t really know why he was listening to Martin for life advice. The man was an insensible pile of mistakes, just because he thought that Jon wasn’t taking care of himself didn’t mean anything. But there was something about the way he’d looked at Jon and told to go home. Was it the eyeliner? Did Jon have a thing for eyeliner? That was an inconvenient thing to learn about oneself a full decade too late to have an emo phase.

In his office, Jonny D’Ville glared at him from the wall, equally judging. “Yes, I’m going,” he told the poster, “I’m just getting my things.” Then he felt like an idiot, talking to a poster.

What the hell was happening to him? Jon was a professional, not some… some fanboy for a bunch of overgrown kids who liked to play dress-up. Who were also, admittedly, skilled performers, but this was getting ridiculous. He had a band poster in his office, and admittedly that hadn’t been his idea, but he hadn’t really fought Elias on it. What did statement-givers think, coming in to see a bunch of space pirates staring at them while they told him their most traumatic experiences? He should take it down.

That’s what he’d do. Later today – after he slept – he’d go looking for another vapid inspirational poster to put in the place of the Mechanisms poster, so the wall wouldn’t be so blank and Elias would be satisfied. He could… take the Mechanisms one home or something. Not that he was some giddy schoolgirl putting band posters in her room, it just… it was a gift, and would have cost Elias money, and he wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good poster. He wasn’t sure why Elias had even gotten him the damn thing anyway. Presumably Tim had mentioned he liked them or something, but Jon wished he’d mentioned that Martin didn’t, so Elias would have gotten something else. Elias was hardly going to intentionally stir petty tension in the archives.


	5. Chapter 5

Jon wasn’t able to find anything to replace the poster with, so it would just have to stay up for the moment. He may have overslept. A little. At least now he could tell Martin he’d gotten more than six uninterrupted hours, if the topic ever came up again. Not that it was any of Martin’s business.

Anyway, as soon as they solved the worm problem, Martin could go back home and Jon would be able to work as many weekends as he liked. Until then, well. There was a statement that needed following up about a service station in Birmingham, which was going to take at least a full day. He normally wouldn’t have bothered with something like that, but the overtones of the statement were very… Prentiss-adjacent, and incredibly recent, and nobody in research seemed to do anything about it, and with the worms all over the Institute… well. So Jon decided to go there the next Saturday, stay the night, and come home Sunday, hopefully with everything wrapped up.

An entire weekend in another town – that was practically a holiday. What unhealthy work obsession? He even found a motel right across the road from the supposedly infested station that did complimentary breakfast. And he invited Sasha, so there would be two people to do the investigating, and he’d have a witness if certain assistants got concerned over his nonexistent overworking. Not that he cared what Martin thought.

\------------------

  
  


“We’re going up in the world, Martin,” Basira said, clapping her bandmate on the shoulder. “The place we’ve booked this time does complimentary breakfasts.”

“Wow, we have truly become celebrities,” Martin replied drily. But he was in a good mood. The show was in Birmingham, which meant no work and no worms. For the weekend, at least, he could relax.

\------------------

  
  


Apparently none of the witnesses that Sasha and Jon actually needed to talk to worked the Saturday day shift, so that day was spent mostly scouting the perfectly normal building itself. Sasha could see the regret on Jon’s face for even coming grow with every passing minute. He even mumbled an apology to her for ‘wasting your time’. Sasha just shrugged – if the institute was paying for her to get away from London for a weekend, the absence of any creepy worms was, in her eyes, a bonus.

The motel was alright. Jon and her had a twin room, and before preparing for a long day of interviewing witnesses about spooky encounters, she was lying back on her bed and randomly scrolling the internet when Jon, face pale, bolted into the room and stared wide-eyed at her.

“Trouble?” she asked, jumping to her feet., but he just shook his head.

“No. Nothing. I, um… I think I just saw Nastya Rasputina in Reception?”

Sasha took a minute to place the name. “From that band you like?”

He nodded.

“Did you talk to – ?”

“Of course not! I’m sure she doesn’t want random strangers bothering her about her music career all the time. I just, what’s she doing here?”

Sasha shrugged. “Maybe she’s on holiday? Or has a day job, like us?” But she was already googling the Mechanisms’ performance schedule. “Oh, apparently they’re performing in Birmingham tonight.”

She realised this was a colossally stupid thing to say about two seconds after she’d said it. Jon’s eyes widened further, and she swore internally. Martin was going to kill her for this.

“Oh, uh, where? When?”

“Um. The pub down the road? At seven?”

“Are there still tickets available?”

\------------------------

  
  


“Martin?” Basira asked. “Is everything alright?”

Martin didn’t look up from his phone. He just stared at Sasha’s messages, as if a strong enough effort of will could banish them from existence. “My boss is here,” he said. “In Birmingham. In this motel.” He got up and quickly shut the blinds. “This is a disaster.”

“It is? Are you faking sick or something?”

“No, I just… if he sees me, I don’t have any excuse for being here!”

“Um, yeah you do. You’re performing tonight. Does he not know about the Mechs?”

“No, no – that’s the problem! He loves the Mechs, he just doesn’t know I’m in the band! He thinks I know nothing about, and also hate, the Mechs!”

“Uh… huh. So, um, how did…?”

“It’s complicated!”

“But he works with you, right? If he likes the band, he’d recognise – ”

“I’m different at work!”

“Huh. You do have a pretty strong stage persona. But why would he think you hate – ?”

“Things just got really out of hand, alright? I’m not… really sure how, it’s just where things are now, and he _cannot_ see me here.” He glanced back at his phone, at a new message from Sasha, and what little blood was left in his face left it. He supposed it wasn’t going to matter any more. Jon was coming to the show.

Jon was coming to the show, and he was going to see him on stage, and there was no way, _no way_ , he’d be able to see him in person and not realise who he was. Not even Jon, whom Martin had once seen mention offhand that he had an orange and then eat an entire lemon without noticing his mistake, was that oblivious.

This was it. This was the last performance of Jonny D’Ville, before Martin finally died of shame.

\-------------------

  
  


Martin finished up his last panic attack about two minutes before it was time to walk out on stage, then shrugged on the Jonny D’Ville persona and strode out like nothing was bothering him. And nothing would bother him, until he walked back off again. Well, nothing irrelevant to the show, anyway – there was always the cues to track, the persistent worry that he’d somehow fuck up a song he’d sung just fine the last fifty times, the chance he somehow wouldn’t be able to keep up with the banter even though eighty per cent of it was rehearsed and the other twenty would be based on well-worn dynamics, all the normal stuff. But he didn’t scan the audience for familiar faces, or wonder what would happen if he saw them. He did the set, thanked the audience, and got the hell off the stage.

And _then_ he had another panic attack.

“Your life is such a fucking disaster, mate,” Jordan said, slapping him on the back. “Point out the Big Bad Boss if he comes over and we’ll run interference, alright?”

“He won’t come over,” Martin muttered gloomily, “because he would have recognised me. He’ll go home and stew in his rage and confusion and call me in for the most awkward meeting ever on Monday morning.”

“You could quit your job, disappear into the aether, and never speak to him again,” Nikola suggested, amused.

“I have considered it, believe me.”

But instead he pulled Jonny D’Ville’s easy smile back into place and went to hawk merch to the audience.

\-----------------------

  
  


Jon was mortified to learn that while the Mechs were good in their albums, listening to them live was transcendent.

He’d never been a concert kind of person. People spoke about the ‘energy’ of a concert and Jon rolled his eyes. He didn’t see the point in paying even more money to listen to a rougher, mistake-ridden version of a song he could get elsewhere, while also being surrounded by yelling idiots who quite probably hadn’t showered. The people in this pub had, presumably, showered, but Jon had still regretted his impulse decision the minute he bought the ticket.

And then he walked into the venue, and he understood what people meant by ‘energy’. He saw what some of the fans were wearing, and wished he’d gotten around to buying those leather boots he’d meant to get, for the archives, because of the worms, and for no other reason. Some of the people clearly had little knowledge of the night’s act, abut a lot of them did, and the air was thick with excitement when the band took to the stage.

And then Jonny D’Ville started speaking. And the band started singing. And Jon wondered how long he’d have to wait for the next live show.

Jon knew that he had a tendency to get… obsessed with things. It was an ongoing matter, he knew it drove everybody around him nuts, and he’d managed to quite effectively deal with it by channelling it into his work over the past few years, which was something it was at least socially acceptable to be obsessed with. But he’d never expected to be so taken with this random band, and the thought that it should matter that he was in the same room with these people was juvenile.

He could have sworn, at one point, that Jonny D’Ville was looking right at him, and his heart stopped.

He definitely stared at him for several seconds after the show, when people were heading over to get things signed, a completely unreadable expression on his face. By the time Jon had debated with himself over whether or not to actually go over, lost said debate, and wandered over, most of the fans and about half the band, including Jonny, had disappeared.

“Hey there,” Gunpowder Tim greeted him, looking incredibly amused for some reason. “Want us to sign anything? The others haven’t left yet, I can run something backstage for signatures if you like.”

Jon blinked. There was no way he was offering that to every straggler. “Um, no, thank you. I just, ah. I enjoyed the show a lot.”

“Glad to hear it. You know anyone in the band?”

“What? No. No; I was in the area for work and just…” oh god, why was he giving his life story to this guy who probably just wanted to pack up and go home? Jon’s eyes drifted over the handfuls of CDs and random accoutrements for sale, resting for half a second on the t-shirts. Gunpowder Tim sized him up with a glance, grabbed an appropriately sized t-shirt and tossed it into Jon’s arms. “A gift. To remember the show by.”

“Um, thank you? But, why – ?”

But Gunpowder Tim was already talking to somebody else.

Jon left, puzzled, looking at his new shirt. That was weird, right? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was just the sort of thing that happened at these shows.

\----------------------

  
  


“He didn’t recognise you.”

Martin peeked out of his pit of existential despair. “What?”

“Your boss. I just spoke to him. He has no idea who you are.”

“You didn’t tell – ?!”

“No, of course I didn’t tell him. I gave him a free shirt. Relax.”

“The last time I relaxed I accidentally let a dog into the archives,” Martin mumbled.

“Your life is _so weird_.”

Martin just shook his head. They didn’t even know about the worms.


	6. Chapter 6

If Martin had been rich, he would’ve looked for somewhere else to book that night at the last minute. But he wasn’t rich, so he made peace with the fact that he was going to have to hide out in his room the entire night, and just be careful not to run into Jon when checking out. The pub was only a block and a half from the motel, so he didn’t bother changing before heading back. He dropped into the service station across the road for some sacks, and couldn’t help but notice the service station attendant staring at him. Not in a ‘your fashion sense is weird’ kind of way. In a… hungry?… kind of way.

Martin dismissed this. In his experience, a good fifty per cent of service station attendants were very weird people. He was just there to buy some damn crisps and get out.

\--------------------------

  
  


Jon lay on his bed staring at the ceiling for several minutes. The entire concert was replaying itself in his head. The sound, the lights, the energy. Jonny D’Ville, who was somehow even better in person and… oh, god. Jon had a crush on a musician.

Not even a musician. On a fictional character played by a musician. That was so much worse. If he was going to suffer the indignity of obsessing over a stranger, it should be one that actually existed.

And now he was, what, supposed to just go to sleep with this realisation? How long was this going to last? He’d been into The Mechanisms for months; was he just going to have to live with this pathetic one-sided affection for the rest of time? Was it just part of his life now?

Jon wasn’t the sort of person who got a lot of crushes. Or did much dating, not that that was particularly relevant. Most people tended to want different kinds of intimacy than he did, which was a pity, because their kind of physical intimacy looked a lot easier than relying purely on emotional and intellectual connection when he was only vaguely emotionally aware at the best of times. But apparently that lack of awareness wasn’t a strong enough shield against a confident demeanour, a good stage presence, and an excellent singing voice.

“I’m going to go and see if our interviewee is at the service station yet,” he told Sasha.

“They said he didn’t work Saturdays,” she mumbled into her pillow.

“No, they said he didn’t work the daytime shift on Saturdays. He might be there. If I’m not back in an hour, assume I’ve been eaten by carnivorous worms.”

“Pick me up a curly wurly.”

Jon knew full well that he wasn’t going to learn anything useful at the service station, but he could do with the walk. It would calm him down a bit.

He assumed.

Then he walked in, and froze, heart trying to squirm its way out of his mouth, because there was

fucking

Jonny D’Ville

in full costume

just standing there, looking at the crisps.

Jon made to leave, but then Jonny glanced up and caught him staring. Jon felt himself blushing, like an idiot, and an expression flitted across Jonny’s face like… fear?

Jon glanced over his shoulder, in case there was anything there to be afraid of. The shop looked normal. When he looked back, Jonny D’Ville was scurrying to the counter, arms full of junk food, not making eye contact. Jon kept his distance. Bad night, maybe?

Jon focused on his own task of finding the curly wurlys until the man gave a very un-D’Ville-like yelp and leapt back from the counter. Jon looked up in time to see why – the cashier had opened his mouth, and worms were falling out. Big, fat, silvery Prentiss worms. They moved a lot faster than the ones in the institute, one leaping right for Jonny’s face; he batted it out of the air with the small satchel he was carrying and stumbled back.

Jon and Jonny both turned to the exit, but the attendant was already there. He spread his arms and just… dissolved into worms.

Jon glanced around for other exits. Jonny was already trying to hurl a whole arse shelf through one of the massive windows to make another exit, but it bounced off. The worms were already spreading out, cutting off access to the windows; Jon grabbed Jonny’s wrist and pulled him to the only other door available, the one to the bathroom.

Jon called 999 while Jonny wet paper towel and jammed it in the door cracks and around the hinges. Jon couldn’t help but admire his quick thinking, since this was the first time he’d encountered the worms. He seemed reasonably cool-headed for a guy encountering the supernatural for what was presumably the first time. He finished with the door, not looking at Jon once, then climbed up onto a sink to block the vent above it. Jon, for his part, started looking around for anything else they could use. There, in the corner; a small CO2 fire extinguisher. Not much. But something.

“Police are on the way,” Jon said. “Bringing the ECDC.”

Jonny nodded, not facing him. Jon couldn’t help but notice he’d barely looked at him, which seemed kind of rude, but that was probably just because he was surveying his handiwork with the paper towel. Jon didn’t want to leave the door, in case he had to struggle against the worms for it, and Jonny seemed consumed with checking the vent on the opposite side of the room. He glanced at the fire extinguisher.

“CO2 kills the worms,” Jon told him. “So if it comes to it…”

Jonny nodded again. “Good to know,” he said, in a voice too deep and gruff to be his natural one. “What are the chances we can hold out until emergency services get here?”

“I don’t know,” Jon admitted. “I’ve seen these before, but they… they’re usually not this fast, or aggressive.” He was used to the fat, slow worms at the Institute; if they were like this when Martin had to deal with them, no wonder the man was paranoid about their presence. Well, that and the two-week siege.

Jon remembered that in the initial Prentiss outbreak, the worms had taken out six hospital staff, and a seventh had died trying to flee.

What were they doing here, though? When he’d chased down this Prentiss-adjacent statement, he hadn’t really expected it to be related. That man had been aggressive, deliberately blocking off the exit to trap them, not frightened and confused like most of Prentiss’ victims. Was he another Prentiss, then? One that hadn’t been on the Institute’s radar, simply because he had been nowhere near London and not enough people had made statements about him?

How many of these things were out there?

“Do you think you could fit through that window?” Jonny D’Ville asked, pointing to a small window high in the wall. It was flimsy, the glass clouded and cracked, and probably not hard to remove, if necessary.

“Probably,” Jon shrugged. “But you can’t, so it’s not an escape.”

“You could go for help.”

Jon wasn’t falling for that. “Already called for help. Help is coming.”

“But going for more help might be – ”

“I’m not leaving you alone in here.”

Jonny D’Ville still wouldn’t look at him. He slumped sullenly against the opposite wall. “So two people can be in danger from the worms instead of one.”

“So when they break through, two people can deal with it better than one can.”

Jonny laughed hollowly, and the sound was weirdly familiar. “When.”

“If,” Jon corrected himself.

“Uh-huh. You’re stubborn as fuck, has anyone ever told you that?”

“You met me like two minutes ago.”

Jonny didn’t seem to know what to say to this. Eventually he said, “And in those two minutes, you’ve been stubborn as fuck.”

“Yes, I do get that a lot.”

\-------------------

  
  


Martin was _terrified_.

Of the worms, obviously. Of the man who had looked over the counter and grinned at him and said, “I see she’s tasted you already, does she know you got away? Let’s fix that,” and then _turned into more freaking Prentiss worms_ , and now it was clear that his liberation from the apartment siege was a false respite and he was, in fact, going to die due to supernatural flesh-eating worms.

He was also terrified because “Jonny D’Ville” was currently locked in a service station bathroom with Jonathan Sims, who might possess a level of obliviousness that Martin had never before seen, but couldn’t possibly fail to recognise him before either help arrived, or they were both eaten by worms. Well, at least when the second one happened, he wouldn’t have to feel awkward any more.

He busied himself with sealing up the worm exits, keeping as far away from Jon as possible, keeping his face turned away when he could, and trying not to speak more than he had to. This made convincing Jon to actually escape through the window extremely difficult, although he didn’t think his luck would’ve been all that great doing it as Martin either.

“We should seal that window up,” Jon noted. “In case the worms come around there.”

“They’re not there now,” Martin replied, still trying to pretend his ‘this is a deep-voiced guy and definitely not Martin Blackwood’ voice sounded remotely realistic. “You could get out.”

“Doing so would break the window and mean the worms would be more likely to get you before help arrives,” Jon said in the manner of someone perfectly at peace with his decision to quite probably die in a service station bathroom, like an arsehole. He wet a bunch of paper towels and took them over to the window. “Boost me up?”

Martin internally debated continuing the argument, but he knew he was going to lose, and the longer they argued, the more dangerous that window became. He crouched down and cupped his hands for Jon. And tried not to think about how Jon trusted Jonny D’Ville’s competence more than he’d every trusted Martin, after knowing him for less than five minutes. There was nothing in the world more pathetic than being jealous of yourself.

Martin could hear Jon making sure the window was closed and starting to paper up the edges, when suddenly there was a loud thump, Jon swore, and everything was covered in worms.


	7. Chapter 7

Jon was quite impressed at how “Jonny D’Ville” was handling the worm attack. He did scream when the worms began to pour through the window, but in his defense, Jon was also, ah, shouting in manly surprise. He jumped off Jonny and ran for the fire extinguisher while Jonny _ripped the paper towel dispenser off the fucking wall like the Hulk_ and, standing on the very tips of his toes, shoved it through the blasts of CO2 and falling worm corpses to block the window.

Logically, Jon knew that the couple of old screws holding the towel dispenser in place wouldn’t have been that difficult to pull free; even he could probably have done it. That didn’t stop it from looking awesome.

Positive side: they were only being beseiged by one station attendant worth of worms. They might have enough CO2 for that. The worms in the bathroom with them were now mostly dead, the last few falling to the nonexistent mercies of Jon’s ridiculously unprotective shoes and Jonny D’Ville’s black leather boots (Jon was getting deja vu, but that could wait until they weren’t in danger). The worm corpses in the window were making an excellent glue for holding the new blockage in place, so no more would be coming through there. Help was on the way, and all they had to do was wait it out.

Negative side: Jon was pretty sure he no longer had a crush on the fictional character Jonny D’Ville. Instead, he most definitely had a crush on the very real musician who played Jonny D’Ville. Whose name he didn’t know, and who was still barely looking at him, and who quite obviously wanted to be away from Jon almost as much as he wanted to be away from the worms, so… not a great start. Also, something was wriggling inside Jon’s leg, and it was becoming pretty painful.

He gave a manly and heroic sort of grunt with no trace of pathetic whimper, definitely not, and sank to the floor. Jonny’s head immediately whipped around, intense and familiar eyes locking onto him. “How many?” he asked.

“Just the one… in my calf…” Jon gritted his teeth. If the paramedics were fast enough…

But Jonny D’Ville was already rooting through his satchel, and produced a pair of surgical scissors. With a disgusting squelch of worm guts, he knelt beside Jon and started cutting his trouser leg away from the site.

“Why are you just carrying around surgical scissors?” Jon asked, too consumed with pain to think too hard about why Jonny’s hands looked so familiar. It wasn’t as though he’d gotten much of a look at his hands on youtube, or the stage.

“Emergencies,” Jonny said gruffly, like it was obvious. Apparently he thought the scissors were taking too long, because he cast them aside, grabbed the fabric in his hands and teeth, and simply tore the bottom half of Jon’s pant leg off.

If he survived this, Jon dreaded explaining this part to Tim. ‘So that’s when the leather-clad stranger tore your pants off with his teeth in a service station bathroom, huh, boss?’

Jonny was pulling something else out of his satchel, and Jon was certain the gas or pain must be making him hallucinate. “Why do you just _have a corkscrew_?”

“Emergencies,” Jonny repeated in the same gruff, too-deep voice.

“What, in case you run into a bottle of wine that absolutely must be drunk?”

“Something like that.” His hands were trembling a little as he locked Jon’s leg between his own to minimise and thrashing about, then placed the pointy end of the corkscrew against the entrance wound. “This is going to hurt,” he advised Jon, like that wasn’t obvious.

Then, as gently as he could without sacrificing speed, he dug the corkscrew into the wound.

It hurt about as much as Jon had expected, which was considerably more than he’d prepared for. He gave up trying not to scream quite quickly and mostly focused on trying not to bite his own tongue and remembering to breathe as Jonny carefully wound the worm into the thread of the corkscrew. His picture was a mask of intense focus, any stage bluster gone as sweat beaded on his makeup and ran down to the tip of his nose and Jon realised, in utter confusion, who he was looking at.

“I’m really sorry about this part,” he said in a gentle, apologetic voice that Jon _definitely_ knew, _what the hell_ , but before Jon could respond, he found out just what the man was so sorry about, as the corkscrew was dragged back out again.

Jon vaguely wondered why he wasn’t passing out. You were supposed to pass out when things hurt this much, right? He would have expected so. Life certainly didn’t seem fair otherwise.

But no, he was fully awake as Martin (Martin??) dragged the worm out of his leg, covered in blood, and shook it off the corkscrew into the general mass of dead worms before crushing it with his boot. He went back to looking through his satchel, then cursed quietly. “Why the fuck don’t I carry bandages?” he muttered, in his stupid fake voice.

“The paramedics will deal with it,” Jon said shakily, grabbing the last of the clean-looking paper towel and pressing it to the wound, then tying it in place with his discarded trouser leg. He was trying to figure out how, exactly, to broach the subject of Martin being Martin. He couldn’t just not say anything, right? He had to say something. But what was there to say? How exactly does one phrase ‘so I just realised that you, my assistant with the physical grace and internal confidence of poorly made flan, have been pretending not to be this musician who I ~~have definitely been developing a crush on~~ admire the art of to the point that I’m pretty sure counts as you openly lying to me, so while we’re waiting for rescue, maybe you can explain what the fuck is up with that?’

Well, he could probably phrase it exactly like that, but it might come off as somewhat confrontational. And they were stuck together until rescue showed up.

Martin had his back to him again, tension in every line of his body. He was watching the window, presumably for further signs of worm incursion, but Jon understood why he wasn’t looking at him now; he didn’t want Jon getting a good look at his face. He didn’t know it was too late, and thought that Jon would fall for this pathetic ruse, like he wouldn’t notice –

And Jon hadn’t noticed, had he? If Martin hadn’t had to pull that worm from his leg and given Jon a good long look at him being, well, Martin, he probably still wouldn’t have noticed. Even though it looked so fucking obvious now. He was wearing the same boots!

God, Jon was an idiot. And of course he’d end up trapped in here with _Martin_ , nowhere near London but still surrounded by worms and lumbered with this –

No, that wasn’t fair, was it? A minute ago he’d practically been in awe of “Jonny D’Ville’s” quick thinking and competence, and now that it was Martin, he was automatically recasting things in the worst possible light. How much of his perspective of someone’s abilities was based in fact, and how much was simply confirmation bias? How accurately had he been judging Martin? Or Tim, or Sasha, or anyone in his life? He was an academic! He was supposed to be smarter than this!

He was Martin’s boss. He was supposed to be fairer than this.

Was this why Martin had decided to keep this a secret from him? He didn’t want to give Jon a worse impression of himself? That made no sense; Jon hadn’t hidden that he liked Jonny D’Ville. He’d –

Oh, god, he’d gone on about his admiration of Jonny D’Ville to Martin, while Tim accused him of thinking Jonny had a ‘sexy’ voice. If he wasn’t hopped up on adrenaline and in a lot of pain, Jon would have blushed.

Wait, did Tim know? Did Sasha?

No. No, they couldn’t have noticed. Jon hadn’t noticed. Until now, and he was alone with Martin, and he had to say something. He couldn’t just not say anything, right?

 _Could_ he just not say anything?

No. No, he wasn’t going to go into work on Monday morning and _pretend_ to not know what Martin thought he didn’t know, that was getting ridiculous. He wasn’t going to get into some convoluted ‘he thinks I don’t know that he doesn’t know’ nonsense loop.

He was still stuck on the question of how exactly to broach the subject with minimum awkwardness when help arrived. As the two were separated and taken off to be inspected and quarantines, Jon gave Martin a nod and said, “I’ll see you at work, then.” He had just enough time to catch Martin’s look of realisation and dismay before he was lead away.

There. Information sent, no awkward fallout. Now they had time to recover and pretend the whole mess hadn’t happened before they would see each other again.

Jon had been told, on more than one occasion, that he was socially inept. But this? This, he had handled perfectly.


	8. Chapter 8

Martin spent most of Sunday staring at the ceiling of the small storage room in the archives that currently served as his bedroom. He had absolutely no idea what was supposed to happen now. He didn’t think Jon did, either.

Tim was going to laugh himself sick.

On Monday morning, at nine o-clock, the sounds of people filing in took place. Tim, sasha.

No Jon.

“Does anyone know where Jon is?” Martin asked them. Maybe something horrible had happened. Maybe he was upstairs explaining to Elias why he was going to fire Martin. Maybe he was going to ask Elias to do it, so he never had to look at Martin again.

“Check your emails,” Sasha said. “He’s got a couple of days’ medical leave. Something happened in Birmingham, he didn’t explain it, but …”

Martin stared. “He was given medical leave?”

“Yeah.”

“And he _took_ it? He didn’t come in regardless and just hope nobody would make a thing of it?”

Sasha stared. “Oh god, you’re right. He must be dying or something.”

“No, he’s not…” he swallowed. They were going to find out anyway, he supposed. “It’s just a leg injury.”

“How do – ?” Sasha did the math. Her eyes widened. “You were there?”

“Jonny D’Ville was,” he said miserably. “There was a Prentiss worm attack. He got one in his leg.”

“Wait,” Tim said, “what? Why – ? What the hell did I miss this weekend?!”

“So that service station guy was related to Prentiss?” Sasha asked. “He texted me that he’d been injured, but I thought he might have mentioned Prentiss!”

Martin shrugged. “I don’t know anything, except that the worms looked the same as hers and tried to eat us. Is that really what’s important here?”

“Yes! That is definitely what’s important here!”

“Not as important as the rest,” Tim said. “Tell us about the Jonny D’Ville thing.”

“Tim, the worms – ”

“Aren’t going anywhere, Sasha, and we can interrogate Jon when he gets back on Wednesday.”

“An injury grievous enough to convince _Jonathan Sims_ to take two days off work – ”

Martin tuned out of the conversation. He knew Jon wasn’t absent because of the hole in his leg. He was absent because he didn’t want to see Martin. He probably never wanted to see or talk to Martin ever again. And why would he? Jon probably felt super awkward after Martin had lied to him so much over the Jonny D’Ville thing. He probably thought Martin had been making fun of him. Martin had, at the very least, been enabling Tim to make fun of him, so Martin supposed he was the bully here, wasn’t he? And Martin had brought Prentiss to the Institute. And caused that service station guy to turn into worms. Everything about him just made Jon’s life harder, so with this deception uncovered, of course he wouldn’t want to see Martin.

He’d probably be happy to never see Martin again.

\------------------

  
  


Jon spent his two days at home mostly on youtube.

Now that he knew who Jonny D’Ville was, he couldn’t… decide whether it was obvious or not. That was Martin’s face. It just was. Those were his eyes. That voice was deeper than how he sounded at work, but it was within the range he’d expect from him, and Jon was beginning to think that what he thought of as Martin’s ‘regular’ voice was really more of Martin’s ‘polite and nervous’ voice. He was Martin, under the costume.

Until he moved, or grinned, or spoke, oozing that confidence and charisma that simply did not gel with the Martin that Jon pictured in his head. Which meant, again, that Martin was probably tense and uncomfortable and stressed out when Jon normally saw him; that is, when he was at work. And Jon was his boss, so that was Jon’s fault.

Also, Jon couldn’t help but wonder if he were more directly responsible. He was always tense and stressed at work, too; there was always that feeling of someone peering over his shoulder, judging his every move, but that was probably just his nervousness at the responsibility of his position. If Martin was feeling like that at work, it was probably because of how Jon treated him. Because of who Jon expected him to be. How much of Martin’s incompetence, as Jon had always seen it, was an actual lack of ability, and how much was Jon seeing what he expected to see? Martin, Tim and Sasha all sometimes found valuable follow-up information, and all sometimes failed to find anything, but come to think of it, Jon couldn’t remember talking about the other two half as harshly as he talked about Martin. Sometimes there was nothing to find.

Jon didn’t know if Martin was the worst of the team or not; human memory was unreliable, and he didn’t have any real, usable data. What he did know was that his opinions of Martin and Jonny D’Ville were like night and day. Which meant that he was unfair to Martin. In a big way.

Jon had a lot of thinking to do.

\-------------------------

  
  


When Jon came in on Wednesday, all three of his assistants were already present. Since it was about eight in the morning, this seemed very strange. Slowly, cane in hand, he hobbled past Martin, who seemed to be trying to hide his entire self under a hat, Tim, whose carefully blank face somehow promised even more chaos than his normal grin, and Sasha, who glared at him.

“Why didn’t you tell us you got attacked by Prentiss worms?” she demanded.

“What?” He blinked. “You were there with me. You knew we were checking out Prentiss worms.”

“We were checking out some kind of infestation that sounded like it might be one of Prentiss’ victims, yes! We weren’t sure! I thought you would have told me once one ate your leg, if it was the same kind!”

“Oh. Well, yes. They do appear to be the same, although I’m hardly an expert. I believe the ECDC took samples.” Oh, god; she knew they were Prentiss worms, which meant Martin had told her he was there, which meant… “Martin, can I see you in my office for a minute?”

Martin stood up with the round-shouldered posture of somebody who was trying to fold the whole universe around him and make it swallow him up, and followed Jon into the office. Once the door was closed and they were both seated, Jon raised his voice a little. “Tim, Sasha, could you stop eavesdropping please? Go and make yourselves some tea or something.” After a few seconds of silence, he added, “I know you’re still there.”

Tim swore quietly, and Jon heard the two leave. Then, he addressed Martin. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “I, ah. I just wanted to say, thank you. For the… assistance, with the worm.” He winced at the memory. “A corkscrew was very sensible thinking. I probably would have packed a knife, which would be a lot messier… well, I suppose I didn’t pack anything, did I? And you did. Very smart.”

Martin shrugged without looking at him. “Well,” he mumbled, “worms. They’re kind of… here all the time, aren’t they? Hard not to think about.”

Oh, god; Jon had forgotten that Martin was staying in the archives. He was never free from the blasted things. And if they’d been like that when Prentiss had attacked him, of course he was prepared, had contingency plans.

“Anyway,” he said. “Are you, uh, alright?”

Martin nodded. “The, um. They looked me over and I was fine.”

“Right, but. Psychologically?”

Martin gave a little laugh. “I’ve been through worse.”

_Oh yeah, when you were beseiged for 2 weeks by the very same worms I’m sitting here making you talk about. I’m a fucking idiot._

Jon cleared his throat again. “Of course. I just, um. Wanted to check. And to thank you.” The time apart had not given him any amazing ideas for how to broach the Jonny D’Ville thing. He’d hoped for inspiration once the conversation was underway. Said inspiration was eluding him. “And to apologise.”

Martin looked baffled at this. “What? Why?”

‘For all of my prior misjudgements of you’ didn’t seem like a great explanation, if the reason for the apology wasn’t already obvious. ‘Oh, hey, maybe you didn’t pick up on it, but I thought you were a loser. Sorry!’ Probably not a good conversation tactic. So Jon just shrugged vaguely. “Oh, just in… general. With everything that’s happening.”

“Prentiss isn’t your fault, Jon.”

“Yes. Well. Still, I… just take care of yourself, alright?”

“Right.” Martin stood up slowly, like he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was being dismissed. It was a pretty clear dismissal, by Jon’s normal standards of communication, but Jon hadn’t brought up The Thing, so he could understand the confusion. Martin glanced at the Mechanisms poster on the wall, then back to Jon. “Jon?”

“Yes, Martin?” Oh thank god. He was going to bring it up. He’d bring it up, and they could deal with this, and everything would be fine.

Martin hesitated. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

Jon’s heart sank. “Ah. Yes please, Martin.”

\---------------------

  
  


Martin was immediately accosted in the break room by Tim and Sasha.

“How did it go?” Tim asked excitedly. “We couldn’t hear any yelling. Any ‘of course, I knew all along’ nonsense? Or just awkward throwing shade?”

“He didn’t bring it up at all,” Martin said miserably. “Didn’t mention it.”

Sasha frowned. “You’re certain he knows – ”

“Oh, he definitely knows it’s me. I was in full Jonny D’Ville for that little siege, and we just had a whole discussion about what had happened, just… not with the Jonny D’Ville part. He just straight-up didn’t mention it.”

“Did you mention it?”

“Of course not! How am I supposed to bring up something like that?!”

“Well, maybe he doesn’t know how to, either.”

“So is this the game plan now? We just never mention it? Pretend it didn’t happen?”

Tim nodded. “For Jon, probably, yeah. If something’s not actively causing problems, why bring it up and possibly cause problems? That’s how he thinks.” Tim scowled. “Must be a nightmare for anyone he’s dating.”

“Is he dating anyone?” Martin asked immediately.

“How would I know? It’s been so long since my last ‘truth or dare tell me your crush’ sleepover with Jonathan ‘No Fun’ Sims.”

“Jon’s fun!”

“Yes, but only unintentionally.”

“Well he’s going to mention it some time,” Martin said. “And then we can talk things out and I can explain.”

“Explain how?” Sasha asked. “Because to be honest, even I don’t really understand how we got to this point.”

“I’ll… I’ll think of something.”

\-------------------------

  
  


Jon sat at his own desk and kind of watched his hands for a while, waiting for Martin to return with a cup of tea to put in them. There was one side effect that he hadn’t been prepared for, with this whole… thing… with Martin.

He’d rewatched all of the Jonny D’Ville he could find over the past few days, until he could see Martin in each of the man’s movements and assure himself that yes, they were the same person. What he had not been prepared for, was seeing Martin again and seeing Jonny D’Ville in each of his movements.

He’d sort of expected this silly crush of his to just go away, knowing who the man was. It hadn’t. All he could think about was Martin’s quick thinking and heroic strength as he blockaded the bathroom, killed worms, pulled a worm out of Jon’s leg via ingenious methods as if it was nothing.

Jon had a crush on his subordinate. A subordinate who presumably hated him, with how badly Jon had been treating him, and whose last encounter with him was a blisteringly awkward conversation where Jon basically unnecessarily brought up his worm-related trauma for a few minutes, and whose encounter with him before that was working to save a useless, screaming Jon from a worm attack.

This was very, very inappropriate.


	9. Chapter 9

Martin couldn’t help but noticing that Jon was odd, over the next few days. _This is it_ , he thought gloomily. _He hates me. There is no coming back from this._

He’d taken down the Mechanisms poster in his office, and while he’d always been brusque and dismissive with Martin, now he seemed to be actively avoiding him. He barely looked him in the eye when they spoke, stammered out the minimum number of sentences as possible to get his message across, and didn’t seem to want to be in the same room as him. This wasn’t his normal overcompensating professional bluster; this was something else. Had Martin really upset him that badly?

Of all the people in the Institute who Martin could tick off, of course he’d gotten into this situation with Jon. It’s not like Martin ever expected his feelings for Jon to, well, go anywhere, but was basic friendship too much to ask? Or anything but uncomfortable anger?

Martin supposed that this was his own fault. He wasn’t sure what he should have done differently, exactly, but he should have done something. Probably just not panicked when he first heard Jon listening to the Mechanisms. But, no – this was his life now, and it looked as if he would have to bear it.

\--------------------

  
  


Tim wasn’t sure whether to be more frustrated or amused at the absolute fucking disaster unfolding before him. He’d always been baffled at Jon’s complete inability to pick up on the giant beacon that was Martin’s feelings for him, and seeing it happen both ways simultaneously did not clear anything up. He wondered idly whether the two had tried the esoteric art of straightforward conversation.

Tim leaned towards Sasha as Martin walked past. “Better not let Jon come in right now, he’d lose it over us having a source of ignition in the archives,” he murmured quietly enough for Martin not to hear. When she didn’t respond, he elbowed her and added, “Y’know, because he thinks Martin’s so hot that – ”

“Yes, I understood the joke, I was choosing to ignore it,” Sasha replied just as quietly.

Tim waited for Martin to leave the room before continuing. “This is killing me, Sash. Look at them both!”

“It’s none of our business.”

“That’s never stopped either of us from doing anything and you know it. How long do you wait before hacking into the company records of everyone new you’re sent to work with.”

“I just want to be prepared to know my coworkers! That’s not a crime!”

“It is, quite literally, multiple different types of crime. But that’s not the point. The point is that if one of those two doesn’t suck it up and make a move soon I am just straight up going to die. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Sasha stared at him. “What happened with us, probably.”

“Okay. But we got over it.”

“Eventually. You want to deal with that kind of fallout for six months in a confined space when one of them is the other one’s boss? And is also Jon, King of the Tactless Wastes?”

“Well I don’t want to live with _this_ until retirement.”

“Tough. Leave them alone.”

“Just a little nudge – ”

“Did you know that even if you delete photos on facebook, they stay on the server?”

“What does that have to do with – ?”

“You sure upload a lot of pretty outrageous photos that you later decide to delete, don’t you, Tim?”

“… I’ll be good.”

\--------------------

  
  


It was four days before Martin decided that enough was enough. If Jon hated him, fine. There was nothing he could do about that. But they were at least going to talk about it.

He marched through the archives with a cup of tea in each hand and determination on his face. He heard Tim mutter, “Oh, thank god, _finally_ ,” but didn’t stop to make conversation about whatever he was talking about; he had a more important conversation to have.

He marched into Jon’s office and set a cut down in front of him.

Jon looked up. “Ah. Martin. Thank you.”

Martin sat in the chair across from his desk. Jon opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Martin said, “About the Mechanisms.”

“Uh. Yes?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was in the band outright. I didn’t… I didn’t expect for it to become a _thing_ , you know?”

“Yes, I rather think we can blame Tim for a lot of that. I completely understand, Martin. And I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable about the whole thing.”

“You didn’t make me uncomfortable,” Martin lied, dishonestly, like a liar. “I just… this is a professional environment, so I never really advertised being in the band, and when Tim found them I kind of…”

“Yes, yes; I completely understand. I panicked when you first heard me listening to them in the office, I can’t imagine how that would have felt from your end.” He cleared his throat. “But it’s all… yes. In the past, I suppose.”

“Right,” Martin said, getting up to leave. “So, um… I’ll just get back to work then, shall I?”

“Yes. Thank you for the tea.”

Martin left. The blank bit of wall that used to hold the Mechanisms poster looked too blank, too bright, too mocking. He supposed that it was only natural for Jon to take it down, to stop listening to their music, to lose interest in the Mechanisms. He’d recently found out that their lead singer was the most colossally disappointing person on the planet, and no number of steampunk goggles and space shanties could make up for him being Martin Blackwood.

Martin had always known that Jon didn’t like him. Never mind Martin’s, well, feelings; the idea of them even being friends was barely realistic. But still, it hurt, to know that his mere presence in the band could ruin it for him.

He wasn’t sure if he felt guilty about ruining the Mechanisms for Jon like that, or angry that his boss thought so little of him that such a thing was possible.

\-------------------

  
  


Jon had stopped listening to the Mechanisms at work, of course. He didn’t want to make Martin any more uncomfortable than he already had.

Part of him was angry at having been lied to, been made a fool of. At Tim and Sasha, obviously, for sitting there and knowing and saying nothing and probably laughing at him, but especially at Martin. But he knew that wasn’t fair – Martin was allowed to keep his life outside the office separate. He was allowed to have secrets. And if Tim and Sasha had stumbled upon them, what could Jon expect them to do? Tell him and break Martin’s trust? No; that part of him was being unfair.

And Jon had made a decision to at least try not to be unfair any more.

So he had respected Martin’s wishes, and kept the Mechanisms outside the office only. Martin finally raising the issue had been somewhat of a relief, at first – finally, they could clear the air and move on. Except things weren’t working out that way. Because Jonny D’Ville wasn’t the issue.

The gentleness in Martin’s tone, the occasional roguish grin now that he was more confident in the office (and the only real difference in the office was that Jon wasn’t being an arse, so that just made Jon feel worse – how much of Martin’s previous attitude was because Jon, specifically, had been making him miserable?), his occasional devastating insightfulness still mixed with oddly endearing physical clumsiness… that was the problem.

And Jon couldn’t do anything about it, except wait for his feelings to die down and go away. He certainly couldn’t say anything. This was his own problem; he wasn’t going to burden anyone else with it. Anyway, Tim would just give him terrible advice, and Sasha would be nice about it, but probably think in private that he was pathetic.

Letting Martin get any kind of hint of his feelings whatsoever was, of course, completely out. He was Martin’s boss. He wasn’t going to put Martin into a position where he felt romantically pressured by his boss. As for his other friends… well. Jon would have said, a week ago, that he certainly had out of work friends. There were people outside of work who he would wave to and make friendly conversation with, and he knew some of their interests and usually recalled which of them had children. But he didn’t have ‘let’s talk about our feelings’ friends. He didn’t have ‘I want to vent about my day’ or ‘I’d expect an invitation to your wedding’ or even ‘you should come to the movies with the group’ friends.

Jon was beginning to suspect that acquaintances weren’t friends and that he did not, in fact, have friends. Aside from Tim. And possibly Sasha. And he could’ve had Martin, if he hadn’t been such an arse to him in the past. And as he couldn’t talk to any of them, that meant it was time for his good old reliable go-to method of dealing with inconvenient feelings – locking them away in a little box far, far down deep in his psyche until they died of starvation and neglect.

Jon could do this. This would all work out fine.


	10. Chapter 10

“It’s Sasha’s birthday on Friday,” Tim announced, tossing some files onto Jon’s desk. “We’re taking her out for drinks.”

Jon opened his mouth to politely decline, then closed it again. He couldn’t exactly refuse to celebrate her birthday. “Right. Where, and what time?”

“Oh, we’ll just head on down together after work.”

“Well, on Friday I might need to stay – ”

“Nope! On Friday, you’re leaving work on time for once.” Tim grinned. “Wouldn’t want to miss Sasha’s birthday drinks, right?”

“Fine. I will… rearrange my work schedule.”

“I knew we could count on you, boss.”

\--------------------------

  
  


Martin didn’t think of himself as much of a regular drinker, but it was a tradition to go out drinking with the other Mechs after a gig, so he knew his limits. Tim and Sasha, it seemed, were more consistent casual drinkers, and also knew theirs. Jon, as it turned out, had done very little social drinking since college, and did not know his limits.

He was also a lightweight.

“All I’m saying,” he told Martin, very insistently, shoving a finger in his face, “is that the word ‘skeleton’ in obnoxiously anthrocentric.”

 _How can you be like this and still manage to pronounce ‘obnoxiously anthrocentric’?_ Martin wondered. But out loud, he just said, “How so?”

“Because why do we deserve the word ‘skeleton’, huh? We come up with the words so we deserve it? Is that it?”

Martin looked around for help, but Tim and Sasha had both vanished. Maybe for innocent reasons, like getting new drinks or needing to use the bathroom. Maybe they just found the situation hilarious. “Um… we have to call the bones something, right?”

“Endoskeleton!”

“I, uh. I don’t…”

“The words we use are skeleton and exoskeleton. Exoskeleton if it’s on the outside, but we get skeleton. Right? _But the exoskeleton came first_. Nobody thinks about that. Skeletons were external first, so why is the internal term preferential? Just because we have one? They should have skeletons, we should have endoskeletons. Anything else is myopic anthrocentric bullshit.” He downed the last of his beer. “Everything in the world just wants to be a crab, anyway, so I don’t know where we got the idea that we humans are special. The predominance of carcinisation suggests that we should be looking at the crab as the default form, not the human. I need another drink.”

“You really don’t,” Martin said firmly, taking the glass out of his hand. “Where did you learn all this biology anyway?”

“I did go to college, you know.”

“You didn’t study biology.”

“I was in the proximity of biology.”

“Uh… right.”

“But the only biology I need right now is what all this ethanol is going to do to my brain. I intend to spend the weekend unconscious. So more beer, I think.”

“Jon, are… are you okay?”

“Of course I’m not fucking okay! How could I… look, have you heard of the Magnus Institute?”

“Um… yes. Yes, I have.”

“I work there. It’s full of flesh-eating worms, the filing system is a mess, and I feel like I’m being watched all the fucking time and I don’t know why. Look, sorry. You don’t want to hear this.”

“No, I… you can talk to me, it’s okay. The worms aren’t, aren’t great, but I’m sure they’ll be dealt with eventually. Things will be okay.”

“Things won’t be okay,” Jon said, woozily shaking his head, “worms or not. That won’t solve the big problem.”

“The watching thing?”

“No, the fact that I’m in love with my assistant!”

Martin stared silently, a chill creeping into his veins. Jon was in, was interested in Sasha? That made sense. She was confident, and capable, and pretty, and, and Martin had known that Jon would end up with someone eventually, but –

Jon misinterpreted his stare and nodded solemnly. “I know. I’m such a creep. How inappropriate is that? Obviously I’d never tell him, I’d never put him in that kind of position, but he’s…” Jon leaned close, like he was telling a dark secret… “he’s very pretty. And extremely kind.” He sat back, tried to swig from his empty glass, and glared at it. “I’m going to do the sensible thing and drink steadily until the alcohol kills off the part of my brain that feels feelings.”

“I, uh, I think that might actually kill you, if you do that,” Martin pointed out, while his heart sang at the revelation that Jon apparently liked men. Although this also meant he liked Tim, not Sasha, which was worse, because Tim was undeniably ‘very pretty’, as Jon had put it, and had some chance of reciprocating if Jon ever did bring it up. Martin already knew he was out of the running, Jon had made it very clear how much he disliked him, but the idea of watching Jon pine after somebody else in the same office day after day made Martin feel sick.

“Good. Guess I’ll die, then,” Jon sniffed.

“Please don’t do that,” Martin said. He struck around for some way to lift the mood and his stupid brain hit on, “If you die now, the archives will never get organised,” and made his mouth say it before he realised how dumb it sounded.

But it must have been okay, because it made Jon laugh. He put the glass down and nodded. “Fair point. You won’t tell him, will you? About my… ugh, _feelings_.”

“He’ll never hear it from me,” Martin swore.

“Good. He’s so timid most of the time, he doesn’t need that kind of harassment in the office, you know? And I don’t need HR on my case. Best to keep trucking along as normal.”

Tim? Timid? Since when? “You’re probably right,” Martin said. “I’m in a similar position, to be honest.”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. But, so long as they’re happy, you know?”

“Yes. And I think he… I don’t think he likes his job. I don’t think he likes _me_. But he’s got others. He’s in a band! They’re fantastic! I can only listen to them at home, because I don’t want to make him feel awkward in the office, but they’re very, very talented.” He glared balefully at his glass. “ _They_ deserve skeletons.”

‘They deserve skeletons’ was not a compliment Martin had ever expected to receive for his music, but his mind was a little crowded with other implications to take much notice of it. He was certain his face was about to burst into flames at any moment, because if he was following the logic correctly… “The guy you like is in a band?” he asked, his voice barely a squeak. He had to be certain.

“The Mechanisms. They’re on youtube. They’re fantastic. But you can’t tell him! About me, I mean. He already knows about his own band. Obviously.”

“I’m sure he does,” Martin squeaked. He couldn’t be here right now. He could not be here right now. He… what? What? None of this made sense.

Jon was very drunk, that was the problem. He was confused, he’d somehow confused Martin for Tim. He’d said the guy he liked was ‘very pretty’, so he had to mean –

“He wears a wig on stage, which is dumb. His normal blond hair is great.”

Martin was blond. Tim had dark hair.

“But even if we didn’t work together, which honestly just makes the whole thing impossible from the start, I still would’ve blown my chance with him right from the start. I was so rude to him, you know? Martin deserves better than me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“He’s probably dating one of his cool bandmates or something. It’s for the best. The sooner I can get over him, the better. You’re a good listener, you know that?”

“People have said that about me, yes.”

“Well. Thanks.”

“Hey, guys!” Tim slid back into his seat. “How drunk is the bossman here, exactly?”

“Um, pretty drunk,” Martin said.

“Hmm. Sasha’s heading off soon, so I’ll make sure Jon gets home okay. This is why you need to drink with us more, boss!” He smacked Jon companionably on the back. “So you can know your limits!”

Jon glowered at him. “You do not deserve the skeleton,” he said.

Tim looked quizzically at Martin. Martin shrugged.

“Right. Let’s… get you home, I think.”

Martin stared at the dregs of his own drink as they left. This was not how he’d expected his night to go.


	11. Chapter 11

Martin spent the weekend freaking out. He spent half his time freaking out that Friday night had happened, and the other half freaking out that Friday night could not possibly have happened. Of course it couldn’t have happened; Martin must’ve… must’ve drank something that some random stranger had spiked by accident and hallucinated the whole conversation. That could happen, right? He’d never heard of it happening, but drink spiking was a thing, and it certainly made more sense than Jon having feelings for him. Jon had been particularly brusque with him and avoiding him lately, like you would with someone you hated. Or, or someone you liked, and wanted to avoid because you didn’t want him knowing, didn’t want to have to deal with it. And he’d stopped listening to the Mechs, even taken the poster down, like you would if you thought a band member lied to or betrayed you. Or if you didn’t want to make them feel awkward and just listened at home, like he’d said he did at the pub.

But, but Jon had to know he was out of Martin’s league, right? He couldn’t actually have feelings for him. This was just some minor blip, a little bit of drunken confusion that, that had been going on for weeks…

But if it was real, if that had actually happened, wasn’t that worse? Because it meant, it meant that Martin’s feelings were returned, which was everything he’d wanted but had long accepted he couldn’t have, but… Jon was right. Jon was his boss. And there might be some people who could make that kind of thing work, but given the chaos they’d had over something as trivial as Martin’s band? Jon and Martin were not among them. There were ways for that relationship to go right, and so many more ways for it to go wrong, and they didn’t… maybe if they had more time, maybe if they knew each other better. But a drunken confession at this point? What was Martin supposed to do with that?

Jon came in early on Monday morning, as usual. He accepted the cup of tea Martin made for him with an officious nod and a word of thanks, as normal, and headed off to his office.

Hmm. He didn’t seem any more or less awkward than normal. “Jon?” Martin called after him.

“Yes?”

“Do you remember Friday night?”

“Of course. We went out for drinks for Sasha’s birthday and I slightly overindulged.”

“Mmm-hmm. And then?”

“Then what?” Trepidation started to creep over Jon’s face. “What did I do?”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“What did I do, Martin?!”

“Nothing! You just, um. You ranted about the etymology of the word ‘skeleton’ until Tim dragged you home.”

“Oh.” Jon relaxed a little. “Yes. Well. I do have feelings on that topic.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“I suppose I should apologise to all of you, for interrupting your night. I knew I shouldn’t have – ”

“No, no; it was fine. We were already wrapping things up at that point. We should do it more often. Go out. As a group, I mean,” Martin added quickly at the sudden mysterious flush flooding Jon’s face.

“I, ah, I don’t often have time for – well, I’m quite busy. And I should get to work now, in fact.”

“Right,” Martin said quietly. He let Jon get to work.

\-------------------------

  
  


Jon drank his tea and stared at the statement in front of him. According to Martin, he’d only slightly embarrassed himself on Friday, so perhaps a quiet apology to Sasha would be enough to tidy that up and move on. His office wall felt empty without the garish Mechs poster; emptier, somehow, than it had before he’d put anything up. But that was just the stupid, whimsical part of his brain that kept getting distracted by unhelpful things, like his feelings for Martin, or the near-constant and completely baseless paranoia that he was being watched.

Why, of all people, did it have to be Martin? Why couldn’t Jon have fallen for somebody he could actually have, or at least someone he didn’t have to interact with almost every single day? Well, the answer to that was obvious – Jon wasn’t great at forming long-term bonds with anyone he wasn’t forced to interact with regularly, so anyone he was going to experience more than a bit of a crush for would have to, by definition, be someone he interacted with regularly. And it was becoming impossible to deny that he had more than just a bit of a crush. He’d hoped his feelings might fade once the whole, the whole ‘cool space pirate’ thing had stopped being such a surprise. They hadn’t.

And Jon had no idea what to do with that.

On the plus side, he was a master at not initiating things. So maybe the ‘ignore this forever’ thing could still work. No reason it wouldn’t, right? He could do this forever, no problem. Except for the slight problem that was Martin.

Specifically, the problem that was Jon interacting with Martin. He’d treated Martin terribly until he, Jon, had bothered to examine the situation and his own feeling in the first place, and now he’d stopped being such a dick and Martin seemed to hate work less, but Martin still clearly didn’t like him, didn’t like being around him, had been flushing and avoiding his eyes and being awkward for weeks, which Jon could no longer dismiss as ‘just being Martin’ now that he’d seen Jonny D’Ville. Martin seemed happier than he had been, but not as happy as he could be. And if Jon’s stupid behaviour because of Jon’s stupid feelings was the cause of that, then Jon was essentially asking Martin to pay the price of Jon not wanting to deal with his own bullshit. So Jon had to find a way to get over this. He had a responsibility to get over this.

He just… had no idea how to do that. And he had so few friends, and so few people to talk to about emotional things. He didn’t even know how to find out who it was appropriate to go to for emotional advice. Was there some kind of chart, or ranking? A secret code, where if somebody had coffee with you three times within a month you could talk about emotional things? (That was something friends did, right? Went out for coffee?) Of all of his acquaintances, there was only one person he knew for certain would be surprised, but not dismissive or offended, if Jon needed emotional advice. Someone who had a lot of experience in this area. And he really, really didn’t want to, but… he was desperate. And this was for Martin.

There was no choice.

\----------------

  
  


Tim had known that many of his decisions in life would come back to bite him. He just hadn’t expected his little ongoing joke about seducing people to be one of them.

Jon was looking resolutely at the cafe table, refusing to meet Tim’s eyes. Tim wasn’t sure whether to be amused or confused. What was happening here?

“I need help,” Jon admitted eventually.

Tim relaxed a bit. That wasn’t unusual, although this thing with the coffee was. If Jon needed some backup on a bit of follow-up, why hadn’t he just told Tim to do it at the office? “What’s up?”

“You, ah. You have a lot of experience with relationships, right, Tim?”

“I suppose?”

“Right. So, um.”

Tim couldn’t keep the grin off his face. “Are you having relationship problems, boss?”

“No! The, the opposite. I mean, I don’t want to be in… ugh, never mind. This was a bad idea.”

“You need advice on how to break up with someone?”

“No! I… I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Jon mumbled, almost under his breath. To Tim, he said, “Forget I said anything. Sorry to bother you,” and started to get up.

Sasha had threatened Tim with the facebook thing, but… “Is this about Martin?”

Jon stumbled and fell back down into his seat. “Who said anything about Martin?” he squeaked.

“Oh, please. It’s obvious.”

“It’s not obvious! There’s nothing to _be_ obvious. This isn’t, this isn’t _high school_ , Tim.”

Tim reminded himself that it would be extremely cruel of him to tease Jon about this right when the man was showing a shred of emotional honesty, and restrained himself. “Honestly, the two of you could’ve fooled me. I think one of you should ask the other one out and get it over with. It’s what I’d do.”

“I’m his _boss_ , Tim.”

“Yeah, that is a bit of a pickle. I don’t know what the Institute’s policy is on those kinds of relationships, but I’m sure we have one. You could look it up. Elias loves policies.”

“Policy isn’t the issue! It wouldn’t be ethical, even if he didn’t hate me, and since he does I’m hardly going to – ”

“Wait. You think Martin hates you?”

“Of course he does. I’m sure you’ve seen him, how he… well, I’m not going to gossip. But you’ve seen him.”

“We’re talking about the same Martin? Works in the archives, makes a lot of tea?”

“If you’re going to mock me then – ”

“I’m not – look. I’m one million per cent sure that Martin doesn’t hate you. And whether he does or doesn’t, this is something you’ve got to talk about with him.”

“That is exactly my point! I can’t! That’s why I need you to tell me how to… not… feel things.”

“Jon mate, between the two of us, you’re a lot better than me at _not_ feeling things. Can’t help you there. Sorry. One of you could move departments, and then you could talk it out?”

“Perhaps, but that isn’t the only problem here.”

“Wait, it’s not?”

“No! He’d still hate me. Although he’d be able to avoid me easier then, so maybe I should try to transfer.”

“He doesn’t hate – ”

“Well, he should!”

Tim considered this. If it was anyone else, he might rib them a bit. Might get involved. Might try to dig up some juicy gossip. But if he did that with Jon, he’d never open up again, at least not to Tim. And the fact he’d sought out Tim proved he didn’t have anyone else.

“Look,” he said. “You know me. I’m a bit of a hopeless romantic. I’d say, throw caution to the wind and follow your heart. That’s what I’d do.”

“I’m, ah, not like you, Tim.”

“I know. But you know who is a hopeless romantic like me? Martin. Either work with that or don’t, but do something, because I don’t have a magic ‘feelings-B-gone’ pill for you and if I have to watch you awkwardly moon over that man for much longer I’m going to transfer out of the archives myself.”

“I don’t _awkwardly moon_ over anyone.”

“Right. Yeah. Of course you don’t. Not blatantly obvious at all.”

“Oh Christ, he hasn’t noticed, has he?”

“Just to clarify, are you, Jonathan Sims, asking me if Martin Blackwood has noticed that you like him?”

“Uh, yes? What’s with that tone? Does that mean he _has_ noticed? Is that why he’s been avoiding me lately; because I’m making him uncomfortable?”

Tim just shook his head and walked away. He’d walked into a shitty soap opera and he wasn’t even a main character. That was so unfair.


	12. Chapter 12

“So apparently he likes me back and I don’t know what to do with that,” Martin finished.

Sasha stared. “Okay. And your question is…?”

“Well, what do I do with that? We can’t date, obviously, but dancing around each other is unbearable! And I feel so… y’know. Guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“Because I wasn’t meant to know! He clearly thought I was someone else, and now he doesn’t know I know, and it’s like I’ve, I’ve stolen a secret from him – ”

“A secret about you. That he wants you to know, and is keeping to himself for your benefit, he thinks.”

“He thinks a lot of stupid things; that’s not the point. Am I supposed to just ignore this forever? Let this become another, another Jonny D’Ville situation? Because once we actually talked about that, it wasn’t such a big deal any more, so maybe I should be all ‘hey, just so you know, I like you’, and he can say it back, and we can move on. Or maybe he wouldn’t say anything back, because of course he wouldn’t because he’s Jon, and me knowing and him not knowing that I know about him, but both of us knowing that each other knows about _me_ , would be way worse. Or maybe it really was just a drunken ramble and he’s changed his mind and me telling him I like him would be a million times more awkward! There’s a, a lot to think about here, is all I’m saying. Maybe not saying anything and just carrying on as normal is the best thing, or maybe that’s stupid and we should talk. I don’t know. What’s the good option here?”

“Have you tried not freaking out around each other?”

“I think we’ve made it blatantly obvious that that is simply not possible for either of us.”

“In that case I’m out of ideas.”

\---------------------------

  
  


In the end, Martin did decide to take Sasha’s advice. He was a strong, independent man who didn’t need no awkwardly requited workplace crush. He could do this. He could Not Freak Out Around Jonathan Sims.

All he had to do was not react to Jon’s occasional brusque avoidance, not overthink every glance or movement in his direction, and not constantly try to figure out if Jon still had feelings for him of if he’d realised it was just a stupid bit of confusion with his stage persona and gotten over it, and which would be worse. It was easy! Martin was rocking this! The archives, where he was living to avoid evil worms and Jon was present, working, _all the time_ , weren’t his own personal hell! Everything was great!

About a week after the new CO2 fire prevention system was installed, Martin was heading through the archives to bed when he noticed the light still on in Jon’s office. He glanced at his watch – nearly midnight – then inched the door open to see Jon lying on his desk, forehead nestled in the crook of his elbow, fast asleep. He hadn’t even managed to put his glasses down before sleeping; they dangled from his fingers, threatening to drop at any moment.

Martin carefully pulled them from his grip and set them safely down. Jon looked cold; he wasn’t wearing his jacket, and the heating had been turned off hours ago. How long had he been sleeping there? Since the room was warm? How could even Jon let himself get that exhausted?

Putting a jacket on a sleeping man would be creepy, so Martin crept to the well-sealed side room he’d dragged his cot into after one too many nights of waking up with the worry that worms were burrowing into his skin and grabbed his thickest blanket. After a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed his pillow, too. The blanket was easy to drape over Jon’s shoulders; carefully teasing a pillow under his head looked to be much harder, but as soon as it brushed Jon’s arm he groaned in his sleep, squished it up in his arms and pushed his face into it. At no point did he come even close to waking.

Martin turned off the lights on his way back out.

\----------------------

  
  


Jon woke with a crick in his neck, which wasn’t unusual, and hunched over with his face in something soft, which was. He blinked into the darkness for a few seconds, wondering why he couldn’t see the light of the streetlight peeking around the blinds of his bedroom window, then felt out the edge of his heavy oak desk. Oh. He was at work. What time was it?

He lifted his face from his pillow and sat up, dislodging the heavy blanket over his shoulders. What?

Oh. Right. Martin was staying here. He must have seen Jon, and… did Jon look ridiculous when he was sleeping? He hadn’t been drooling, had he? He hadn’t talked in his sleep? Was there a non-awkward way to return this bedding?

Jon glanced at his phone. Three in the morning. Absolutely no point in going home now. He stood up, stretched his stiff back, and managed to only trip over two boxes on the way to the light switch. Fortunately, he never stubbed his toes any more, because he’d gotten himself a pair of sturdy steel-capped leather boots in a lovely deep brown.

Because of the worms, of course.

He made himself a cup of tea and got to work. Four hours later, Martin brought him a cup of tea.

“Ah. Yes. Thank you, Martin.”

“Do you ever not work?” Martin asked.

“Of course. But it is a workday.”

“It’s not a workday for two more hours.”

“Well.” Jon cleared his throat awkwardly. “It’s important to keep on top of things.”

Martin was still watching him with obvious concern. He wouldn’t leave. Why wouldn’t he leave? Jon almost defended himself by pointing out that he’d gotten a lot of sleep, but since Martin clearly knew that sleep had been on the very desk he was now poring through statements on, that was unlikely to strengthen his case.

“Hmm,” Martin said. “Well, I’m going to make some toast. You want some?”

“Ah, no.” Jon looked back down at the statement in front of him. Was he blushing? He could feel himself blushing. Over toast? Why? “No, I uh. I’m going to keep working.”

Martin nodded, turned, and immediately tripped over one of the boxes that Jon had stumbled on on his way to the light. Martin fell backward, flailing for balance, and his arm caught the edge of one of the shelves on the wall lined with boxes and tapes. It promptly crashed down onto the shelf below it, scattering the contents of both everywhere.

“Oh!” Martins said. “Oh, I’m sorry, I, I didn’t mean to – ”

Jon bit down the reflexive sarcastic remark and reminded himself to be a better person. If a stray flailing hand could knock down a shelf, the problem wasn’t Martin being clumsy; it was a badly installed shelf. “Stupid flimsy things,” he said. “That shouldn’t have come down like that.”

“I didn’t mean to knock it down, I – ”

“If it can’t take a little jolt, it was going to come down pretty soon anyway, with the weight it’s usually carrying.” Jon inspected the large holes left where the screws had torn free. This wasn’t like a paper towel dispenser being held up by a tiny couple of screws in a gas station bathroom; they were long, and had been sunk well into the wall, that had broken away around them. He rubbed his fingers on the soft, crumbling material. “I think this is just plasterboard. And in very bad condition, at that. Destroyed by moisture or something?”

“Plasterboard?” Martin looked. “Isn’t this an exterior wall?”

“It should be.”

“So shouldn’t it be brick or concrete or something? In a basement?”

“You would think so.” There was some kind of space on the other side; Jon remembered books he’d read in his childhood about secret spaces and hidden treasures behind the walls of old houses and, without really thinking about it, started tearing the crumbling plasterboard away.

“Um,” Martin said, “Jon, I don’t… I don’t think we should really… Jon, look!”

Jon didn’t need to look; he could hear. He could hear the horribly familiar squishing and squirming through the widening hole and could do nothing but stare mutely as Martin shone his flashlight inside to reveal a space far larger than Jon would ever have guessed, and full of writhing silvery worms.

The pair didn’t need to say anything. As the tide of worms rushed forward, they turned and ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As an apology for upcoming worms, this chapter contains one scene of pure somft.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nice big chapter fat with juicy, juicy worms.

They weren’t able to make it out of the archives. Furthermore, Martin dropped his phone while fleeing, and Jon’s was still in his jacket in his office. But Martin pulled Jon into the smallest storage room, where he’d moved the cot a while ago, and they slammed the door shut and dragged the cot against it and they had very few worms inside them, considering. Martin grabbed two corkscrews from a little shelf in the corner, tossed one to Jon, and got to work on his own shoulder with the other.

Martin had ended up with a few worms in his arms; on Jon, there were just a couple in his legs. Again. He didn’t relish the idea of digging into his own flesh but he liked the idea of being a worm monster a lot less, so he pushed down the rational part of his mind that was screaming ‘that’s your own fucking leg, idiot!’, pretended he was excavating some other piece of meat, and dug in after the worm.

“How many corkscrews do you have?” he hissed between his teeth once they were out, trying to distract himself from the ongoing horror parade that was apparently just his life now.

“Four people work in the archives,” Martin replied, his voice as strained as Jon’s, “so I have four corkscrews. In case we need to do more than one extraction at a time, like this. And to avoid contamination.”

“Contamination?” He eyed the disgusting things that had just been contaminating their bodies.

“Blood contamination. Like not sharing needles, you know?”

“Ah. Yes. That’s sensible.” Martin had thought extensively about this, Jon realised, holed up here with the worms that had beseiged him for two weeks. He probably lay awake at night wondering what to do if they got in, if they got him, if they got anyone else.

“This is the most protected room in the archives,” Martin continued. “The seals around the door ate intact. The only real entrance point is the vent up there, which we can control easily. They can’t come in all at once, and there are four fire extinguishers in here. So we should be alright.”

“Right. Good.”

“Bandages are in the first aid kit on the shelf next to you, if you could…?”

Jon nodded and reached for the first aid kit, which turned out to be a backpack, fully stocked with bandages, antiseptics and what Jon had to assume were the strongest painkillers one could buy without a prescription. His eyes drifted down to the shelf below and saw that it was completely stocked with a wide variety of canned foods, far more than Martin could have bought for day to day eating. He vaguely remembered that Martin had had to ration the last time he’d been trapped by the worms. He didn’t point out that there was no danger of being trapped here for two weeks; the longest a worm seige in the archives could last would be a single weekend, before somebody came in on Monday and noticed, well, all the worms. If turning a random storage closet into a survival shelter helped Martin feel safe, then whatever.

Besides, his overstocked first aid kit was coming in handy, Jon thought as he passed out bandages and painkillers.

“There’s bottled water next to the cans,” Martin told him. He passed a bottle of water over, too.

“Martin,” Jon said.

“Mm?”

“It’s going to be okay.”

“I know.” Martin took a deep, shuddering breath. “In two hours, other people will come in to work. Tim and Sasha will see all this and evacuate the building and call the ECDC. They know at least one person is down here – me – so they’ll send in people to rescue us first thing. So long as there are no nasty surprises in the next two hours, everything’s completely fine.” His voice sounded steady enough, but he looked very pale. His hands were trembling.

“Yes,” Jon said. “Exactly. So everything’s going to be okay.”

They sat and bled in silence for a bit, eyes glued to the vent for any sign of worms, before Martin said, “I nearly quit, you know.”

“What?”

“The archives. Between all the fucking worms and the… everything going on, the job just didn’t seem worth it, you know? Typed up a nice resignation letter. Never really got round to handing it in.”

“Why not?”

Martin shrugged. “Just couldn’t bring myself to take that final step, I guess?Couldn’t bring myself to leave without seeing this through.”

“The worms, you mean?”

“… Yeah. The worms.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry, Jon.”

“What? Why?”

“She followed me here. This is my fault.”

“That’s patently untrue. You saw the text message she sent. She’s gunning for me. So I should apologise to you.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Then it isn’t yours, either. Look, I’m… glad you didn’t quit. I mean, I’m not glad that you’re uncomfortable here, with the, the worms, I just… I like working with you, Martin. And I’m sorry that I don’t always express that particularly well.”

“I like working with you, too.”

“Uh, really?”

“Yeah. I would’ve quit if I didn’t.” He glared at the vent. “Worms would probably just follow me to my next job anyway. If I could even get one in this economy.”

“There’s always space piracy.”

Martin laughed a little at that. Jon wished he could make Martin laugh more, in better situations. Maybe he should try to do that more often, when they got out.

But Martin’s smile disappeared pretty quickly as he glanced at the back wall, eyes widening. Jon looked, but there was nothing there. Just the wall. “What is it?”

“That wall. That’s an exterior wall, too.”

Oh.

“They can’t get through,” Jon assured him. “Even if there’s more space behind there and there are… well. They only came through after we made a hole in the office. So they can’t exactly push through that one, can they?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Nevertheless, Martin grabbed a fire extinguisher, wincing as he used his wounded arms. Given that this was his third worm siege, he seemed to be holding it together pretty well.

Then Jane started knocking on the door.

\----------------

  
  


Martin was not holding it together. He’d had enough of this, he’d had enough of worms, and he’d be babbling incessantly if he could hold himself together long enough to form more than a couple of words at a time, but he couldn’t. Then the knocking started, and he just… wrapped his arms around the fire extinguisher, and existed, while Jane knock, knock, knocked on the door.

“Martin,” some part of the world said while it knocked.

“Martin?” the world said again.

Then there were arms on his shoulders, carefully avoiding his worm injuries, and Jon was saying, “Martin, are you alright?” and trying to look into his eyes.

Martin blinked and tried to pull himself back into the world to talk to Jon. “Mm.”

“It’s alright,” Jon said. “I know this isn’t… this is horrible, I know, but we are getting out of here. Help is coming. When Tim and Sasha come in – ”

Martin shook his head. Jon didn’t get it, he didn’t understand that this meant they were doomed. Martin had to explain. He put his hands on Jon’s. “I have neighbours,” he said.

Jon looked confused. “I don’t…?”

“I have neighbours. But when she knocked, for weeks…”

“They didn’t do anything,” Jon said, realisation and dread swamping his face. “She hid herself somehow.”

Martin nodded. “Tim and Sasha might not see anything.”

“They’ll notice we’re missing fairly quickly. Text messages wouldn’t fool them twice.”

“And how will they find us? If my neighbours…”

“We’ll know in a couple of hours. No need to panic over things we can’t change, at least until then. Maybe she’s not hidden from them.”

“That’s worse,” Martin pointed out. “That’s worse, because it means they’ll come in and she’ll attack them and they’ll be trapped, too, and they won’t know where the good places are to hide and they’re going to be eaten by – ”

“Martin! I’m sure they’ll see the worms in time.” But he looked uncertain. He glanced nervously at the back wall, that might be hiding more worms. He glanced back at Martin, at the bandages on his arms, and then at the ones on his own legs. “We just… need a backup plan, I guess, in case they don’t. Or in case she’s invisible to them somehow, or in case – will you stop knocking!” he shouted at the door.

“She won’t stop,” Martin said.

“Of course she won’t. God forbid we get to think for five minutes.”

Martin nodded. It had been so much easier to pretend that they were safe when she wasn’t knocking. Maybe that was the whole point. “If we do die,” he said, “at least it will be suitably dramatic. I tried to write lyrics for the Mechs about it, with the other siege, but they wouldn’t come out right. I’m sure the rest of the band will think of something.”

“I doubt they’re going to turn your death into a scifi steampunk musical album.”

“Pity. I’d hate or a death this weird to go to waste.”

“Do you ever think about what the world will be like without you?”

“Not until I transferred to the archives. Lately though, yeah. A lot.”

“It’s certainly not what I expected from an archiving job, either. I wonder who Elias will hire to replace me.”

“Sasha, probably. If she doesn’t get taken by surprise and eaten by worms.”

“You think Sasha wants this job?”

“Well, yeah. She wanted it when you got it.”

Jon stared at him in surprise. “She did?”

Martin just rolled his eyes. It was charming how fucking oblivious Jon was. “Yeah, but then again, she and Tim probably won’t stick around after half the department is eaten by evil worms. It’s the sort of thing that makes you look for a new job, I think.”

“Are you going to look for a new job?”

“What?”

“If we… when we survive this. You said you were kind of invested, with the worms and all that, but but…” Jon gestured around to their environment in general. “This would be anyone’s last straw.”

“What about you?” Martin asked. “Are you going to look for a new job?”

“You didn’t answer the question, Martin.”

“Neither did you.”

Jon just hugged his knees and locked his eyes back on the vent.

“It’d be kind of nice to be sure whether we were going to die here, wouldn’t it?” Martin asked. “You know, for certain. It’d really take the stress out of the situation either way.”

“We’d know whether or not we had time for one of those Dramatic Last Conversations,” Jon agreed, nodding.

“Oh, I always hate those in stories.”

Jon looked at him in surprise. “Really? O would’ve thought they’d be right up your alley, with your whole…” he waved a hand vaguely.

“My whole what?”

“You know. Your… poetic romance sort of deal.”

“But that’s just it, isn’t it? They’re always people trying to avoid honesty and intimacy. It’s like ‘I kept this to myself forever, but now that I’m dying I can tell you and escape all the fallout’.” Like hiding out from worms in a bathroom with someone and then having them reveal they know who you are right as you’re separated and you don’t have a chance to respond. “It’s all having their cake and eating it too, which is just unfair. If they really cared, they’d have said something sooner.”

Jon cleared his throat. “Well, perhaps they did care, and they did want the other person to know, but the consequences were too severe. Maybe they didn’t want to inflict those on the other person.”

“When they confess on their deathbed, they’re still inflicting those consequences! They just don’t have to see it themselves, but the other person has to live with whatever their secrets or feelings or dark hidden truth was, and has to do it alone. They should talk earlier or not at all. It’s just being selfish.”

“Well, that’s easy to say, Jonny D’Ville…”

Hard to argue with that. “Okay, yeah, fine. In real life, things do kind of get out of hand. We’re not poster children for great communication.”

“That is the understatement of the century.”

“You can say that again. Sometimes I wonder if – ”

“Martin, I think I might be in love with you.”

Martin opened his mouth. Closed it again. Somehow, despite already knowing this, having Jon just say it to him on purpose was a sort of surprise that he didn’t really know how to deal with.

Jon clearly mistook his silence, because he started babbling. “I mean, I’m not trying to… I’m just stating it as a fact. I don’t expect anything of you, obviously, and I didn’t want to say anything because I knew it’d make you uncomfortable, and I’m very sorry about that, but it’s information that I thought you should have, I suppose, and that thing you said about how if it’s something you’d confess on your deathbed then it’s selfish not to confess it earlier got me thinking that – ”

“I love you too, Jon. I think.”

Jon stopped talking. Gaped for a few seconds. Rediscovered his voice. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Just to be perfectly clear, while I also value you as a person and hopefully a friend, I meant in a romantic – ”

“I know, Jon. Me, too.”

“Okay. Um. Really?”

“ _Yes_ , Jon.”

They sat in silence for a little bit, until Martin ventured, “So what do we, um.. do with this information?”

“I have no idea,” Jon admitted. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to do anything with it, if we’re both staying in the archives. But I’m also tired of doing nothing with it, if that makes sense.”

Martin nodded. “We should probably put a pin in it at least until Jane… wait. You hear that?”

“What?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing.”

The knocking had stopped.


	14. Chapter 14

“What’s she doing?” Jon asked from his position on the floor. He could stand, he was pretty sure of it, but if there was no reason to, he wasn’t going to push his luck.

Martin tried to see through the filthy glass window in the door. “She’s, um, destroying the statements.”

“Destroying them?”

“Well, I don’t know what exactly that stuff coming out of her mouth is, but I think we should probably burn them.”

Ew. “Right. Well at, at least Tim and Sasha will know immediately that something’s off, if she’s making a mess out there. Won’t they?” He shifted position, trying to get… well, if not comfrtable, then at least in less pain. Over-the-counter painkillers weren’t doing as much as he’d hoped for he pain of being eaten alive.

“I hope so. But, y’know, it’s a big archive, with a lot of blind spots.” He spun around at Jon’s sudden gasp of pain. “Jon, are you – ?”

“Fine, fine.” Jon winced. “Just, ah, moved against something in my pocket, I suppose. My keys, probably.” Careful not to jostle his wounds further, he fished into his pocket and pulled out something small and rectangular. A cigarette lighter. What?

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Martin said.

“I don’t.”

“I didn’t know you allowed sources of ignition in the archives, either,” he added teasingly.

“I… don’t.” Jon turned the device over in his hands. It was a stock-standard cigarette lighter, with some kind of cobweb design etched into it. Huh. It was strange what kind of junk just turned up in pockets, wasn’t it? He put it aside and reached back in for his keys, but as he did so he happened to glance up at the ceiling, and froze. “Martin?”

“Yeah?”

“We can assume that smoke alarm works, right?”

\---------------------

  
  


The plan was simple. The plan was easy. The plan was definitely a violation of several safety codes and Elias wasn’t going to like it at all, but under the circumstances, Martin couldn’t quite bring himself to care.

The giant bottle of methylated spirits that he’d bought in one of his siege-preparation binges just in case he needed something to sterilise things with and the little tubes in the first aid kit wouldn’t cut it had a big warning label on it declaring it flammable. Jon upended the bottle on the cot and Martin dragged it into the middle of the room, right under the smoke alarm.

“The fire won’t have to be big,” Jon said, “but it should keep burning until the worms are dead. I don’t know if the fire suppression system will shut off without a fire and don’t want to risk it.”

“Is the CO2 going to be dangerous to us?” Martin asked.

“I don’t think so. I mean, yes, in that its whole purpose is to take the place of oxygen, so there is the breathing issue.”

“Oh, just the breathing issue,” Martin said lightly. “Just that.”

“I am fairly confident, based on what we know, that the worms are far more vulnerable to carbon dioxide than we are. Besides, even if the archives were entirely flooded with it before we made a run for it, a human can survive for several minutes without oxygen, so…”

“How long can a human run without oxygen?” Martin asked.

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

“And how long can you run at all? Can you make it? Because this isn’t worth your life. We can sit here and wait to be discovered rather than – ”

“No. No; I can do it. And even if… anything else would be putting Sasha and Time in danger. The whole point of a fire suppression system is to make a building safe, so… so I’m sure it’s safe for us.”

“I’m sure it’s safer for us than a fire would be, yeah, but…”

“I can do it, Martin.”

Martin wasn’t sure he believed him. “Alright.”

“Good. So I’ll just – ”

“Protection,” Martin said. “Just in case the worms don’t all die, or Jane’s somehow immune or something, I should see if I own any more protective clothing.” He dug through his bag of Jonny D’Ville stuff, wishing his alter ego wore more leather. Steampunk fashion was full of leather! Why didn’t he own bracers, or something? He had several belts, but they might do more harm than good…

He was able to find his leather vest and a leather jacket. He pulled the vest on and tossed the jacket to Jon, who drowned adorably in the vast sea of jacket far too big for him.

“Satisfied?” Jon asked, trying in vain to straighten the shoulders of his personal leather ocean.

“Not really, but it’s all I have,” Martin shrugged. “Ready when you are.”

Jon lit the bed on fire.

\--------------------

  
  


Sasha came into work early. She knew Martin would be about, as well as a few of the early employees, but she was pretty sure she’d beat even Jon this morning.

What she did not expect was to be halfway down the stairs to the archives and hear the fire alarm go off. She turned to file out, s per the fire procedures, but… was that another sound, coming from the archives? Hard to hear over the alarm, but she could swear that she could hear someone, or something, screaming. Scream unlike anything she’d ever heard, a scream she could feel in her bones, one thousand voices and one. Definitely nothing human.

Jane?

Martin was down there.

Sasha charged down the stairs just in time to see the door to the archive kicked violently open. Martin stumbled out, carrying Jon through the doorway in a bridal carry, both of them with rather more blood on them than could be healthy. Jon’s arms were locked around Martin’s neck, his bleeding legs trailing an unravelling bandage like a gory wedding train.

“What – ?”

“Worms,” the boys said together. Then Jon continued, “Don’t touch us, Sasha. We can’t be absolutely certain we’re not – ”

“Yeah, I read the statements,” Sasha said, backing right up as she called for an ambulance. The three headed for the exit but lingered in the lobby, so that no one would accidentally come into contact with Jon and Martin while they waited. Sasha wasn’t that worried – the boys were checking themselves pretty thoroughly and they’d have to notice any worms, right? But she couldn’t help but remember that she hadn’t noticed the one in her until Michael was cutting it out. She couldn’t help but think of Timothy Hodge, who’d burned his flat down, generally lived his life and eventually come in to make a statement all completely unaware that he was infected.

The sooner the paramedics arrived, the better.

\---------------------

  
  


Everything was better once the paramedics arrived. One of the first things they did was put Jon and Martin on so many painkillers that the possibility of infestation didn’t seem to matter any more until said painkillers started to wear off, and by then, they had all the test results back that cleared them. Nobody would be turning into a writhing flesh hive. They were both given two weeks off work, and Elias dropped in in person to impress upon them (Jon) the importance that they (Jon) actually take such time off and go home and rest and heal (you are going to actually go home and rest and heal, aren’t you, Jon).

Martin wasn’t looking forward to going home. He’d been to his flat since the first siege, to clean up a bit and pick up things he needed, but the idea of sleeping there again wasn’t.. ideal. He debated the merits of staying with one of his bandmates for a bit, but after two weeks they’d definitely get on each others’ nerves.

Well, he wouldn’t be totally alone, he supposed; after the siege, there was no way that Tim and Sasha wouldn’t drop in to check on him regularly. And he’d probably call Jon every day to make sure he was actually taking care of himself. Speaking of Jon…

“So,” he said, taking a seat next to Jon at the bus stop. “Immediate crisis has passed.”

“I suppose it has. You’re going home?”

“That’s what they said.” Martin eyed Jon’s legs. The man could barely take care of himself at the best of times; how was he going to do barely able to walk?

“Yes, but. After everything.”

“I don’t know what – ”

“The look on your face when she started knocking. It was… well.”

“I can handle it.”

“I have no doubt that you can, but you shouldn’t have to. Not this… suddenly.”

“Yeah, well, my options are limited, so – ”

“I have a pull-out couch, if you need… a few days, maybe, to adjust. I’m not suggesting anything untoward! I just… have a couch.”

Martin considered it. On the one hand, probably not a fantastic idea. On the other, he and Jon had been tripping over each other in the archives for weeks anyway, and he was pretty sure that Jon didn’t want to be alone right after Prentiss any more than Martin did. Besides, somebody was going to have to make sure Jon ‘I can definitely make it out of the archives, Martin, go ahead with the plan’ Sims actually rested and looked after himself, and maybe a couple of days together would help with that. Between Martin’s uninjured legs and Jon’s uninjured arms, they had pretty much one fully functioning body between them.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”

“It’s no problem.”

“But,” Martin continued, “we need to get something straight first. Given how… not great… we’ve both proven to be with… things, I think we should agree to actually talk about things that come up like reasonable human beings. And to respond to each other like reasonable human beings. Because not doing that hasn’t been working at all, and I’d rather we don’t kill each other before getting a chance to go back to work.”

“It’s a little outside my normal strategy, but I’m willing to try that if you are. Provided we get something else straight as well.”

“… Yes?”

“I listen to this one band a lot at home, you might not have heard of them? They’re called the Mechanisms. So I hope you can tolerate science fiction cabaret being played around the house.”

Martin smiled. “I think I can learn to adapt.”

Martin didn’t know what his future would hold, or what role Jon would occupy in it. Maybe they’d decide to just stay friends, at least for now, with the work situation and them both still learning to communicate with each other; maybe they’d decide to try for something else, no matter the risks. But if they could do it together, with their eyes open and intentions clear, he was sure that wherever they ended up was going to be a good place.

Hopefully without any more worms in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to dash any hopes but yes, this is the end and I will not be writing ten more chapters of The Hilarious Misunderstandings Of The Boys In Jon's House. This genre is very far out of my wheelhouse and I have other zany fics to pursue, and the last time I went 'oh I could add just one more part with...' to a fic I ended up writing 300k words of shenanigans so we're sticking to the premise this time. Hope you had fun with our disaster boys.


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